Cigarette Advertisements on Barn Façade, Chilton County, Alabama

“Cigarette Advertisements on Barn Façade, Chilton County, Alabama” by  Walker Evans was photographed in 1935 and captures the commercialization of low-cost cigarette advertisements plastered across a weathered barn fence. The moment captured is one where mass mediation and class identity intersect to shape the human identity among classes to create a unified consumer identity. By itself, the advertisements seem simple and have no reaching meaning, that is until the context sets in. The advertisements are one of luxury, modern consumer culture, and a standardized national acceptance of belonging, regardless of social class. Or is it? The posters are branded along a rundown barn in Alabama, literally covering up the distressed wooden materials, and therefore struggles of the lower class, as they are fed the lie of a national consumer brand identity. The contrasting materials of the distressed wood and pristine advertisements reflects the reality of socio-economic classes in the early 1900s and the need to bury the working class, and their spaces, to create a unified culture of consumerism through a desire to sell addictive products to the working class. 

The plastering of addictive cigarette advertisements on the wooden barn is an act of changing the community, taking the working class and shaping it into a generalized national consumer identity by introducing and enticing audiences to partake in the addictive lifestyle, literally and figuratively, through the use of tobacco and the promise of acceptance and belonging with the unification of classes coming together through the action and consumption of cigarettes.