Decomposing and Reconstructing the Marginal: Walker Evans’ Portrait Photography in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The pictures are for the most part mild, but in spite of this, though always exquisitely clear in reasoning and in visual quality, they pack a wicked punch. There’s nothing oppressively ‘photographic’ here, it isn’t a long nose poking into dirty corners for propaganda and for scandal, there are no trick shots, the composition isn’t a particular feature – but the pictures talk to us. And they say plenty. – William Carlos Williams, “Sermon with a Camera” In the year of 1936 in Hale County, Alabama, American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans spent the summer of their collaborative verbal-visual book project collecting both photographs and written testimony of Americas rural populace. During the Great Depression, after the 1932 Presidential Election during which Franklin D. Roosevelt came into power with his “New Deal” instead of Hoover’s “Laissez Faire Policies”, a prioritized concern about the national agriculture became apparent. Under […]