Although small and prosaic, this show is also richly resonant. It presents 700 of Evans’s postcards, arranged in gridded expanses according to subjects that are announced by Evans’s original, hand-labeled dividers, which are also in the grids. The subjects are wide ranging; the colors are beautiful. Evans had a special eye for images in which a pale-colored scene  a beach for example  is punctuated with bits of opaque black, usually figures or horses.

Image Frame Houses in Virginia by Mr. Evans. Credit... Metropolitan Museum of Art

Through his postcard collection, Evans studied to be the artist he would become. He trained himself to see in terms of photographic images, which helps explain how his own pictures became so lucid so quickly in the late-1920s and early ’30s. He was not above copying to learn. His 1929 photograph “Front Street, Looking North, Morgan City, La.” almost perfectly matches the vantage point of a postcard displayed next to it that he owned. The label equivocates about which came first, but the odds that Evans made the picture first and later found a nearly identical postcard seem too high.

The show opens with a bank of postcards that offer plunging views down the middle of scores of American Main Streets, an almost scary tribute to the country’s can-do spirit, can-doing again and again. A memorable Evans image that is not in this show may spring to mind: his 1931 photograph of the rain-slicked main street of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., lined mostly with diagonally parked Ford Model A’s. It is the Main Street postcards distilled, enlarged, crystallized in black and white, with undertones of grim complacency. (Evans disdained color photography until late in life.)

The show includes a smattering of Evans’s own photographs and the postcard prototypes that he made from them in 1935 and ’36; the occasion was a publishing project initiated by the Museum of Modern Art that never came to fruition. Evans had no compunction about radical cropping. It is startling to see good images become better as he reduces background space and brings central forms forward. Cropping intensifies the geometry of everyday life to which Evans was instinctively drawn.

Image A detail from Penny-Picture Display, Savannah. Credit... Metropolitan Museum of Art

For example the sudden prominence of the ferry on a postcard of Vicksburg, Miss., makes the original photograph look slightly lackluster. The same is true of “View of Easton, Pennsylvania,” even though its original is present here only in reproduction. The closely clipped, game-board-like precision of flat yards, fences and small, boxy houses in the postcard version makes it all but perfect. Also represented here are the original and truncated versions of Evans’s images of frame houses in Virginia and a church in South Carolina, and his “Penny-Picture Display, Savannah.” Its tiny, repeating photo portraits echo this show’s dominant compositional motif. The postcard (listen up, appropriation buffs) almost qualifies as a rephotograph of a rephotograph.