• RESEARCH
  • #USSOBOOKHOUR
  • REVIEWS
  • EYES ON EVENTS
  • SPECIAL SERIES
  • EVENTS
  • #WRITEAMSTUDIES
  • USSOCAST

British Association for American Studies

×

Bowen Wang

Bowen Wang is a current PhD student in English Literature, Trinity College Dublin (fully funded by TCD-CSC scholarship programme). He received his MSc in Literature and Modernity at University of Edinburgh, following the completion of his BA in English Language and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include literary modernism, experimental form, visual culture and aesthetics.

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 […]