Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men      “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” was written by James Agee and Walker Evans. The story is about three white families of tenant farmers in rural Alabama. The photographs in the beginning have no captions or quotations. They are just images of three tenant farming families, their houses, and possessions. “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.” (87) The story and

In James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the photographs are given “independence and co-equality” compared to the text. There are no captions to accompany the photographs, and there are no explicit descriptions of them in the text. This makes the photo essay distinct from the conventional model in which text is broken up and supported by images, which makes the most logical sense to readers. I agree with Mitchell in that this is an interesting way to treat pictures, and it is

James Agee and Walker Evans Fortune Magazine, in July and August of 1936, sent James Agee and Walker Evans to research a story on sharecropping. In the preface of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee describes it as “a curious piece of work.” They were to produce “an article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers,” (IX). James Agee and Walker Evans set out to write

Suffering in Photographs Photographs are used to document history, however selected images are chosen to do so. Often times these images graphically show the cruelty of mankind. In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asks, "What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?" To acknowledge suffering is just to capture it, to point it out and show somebody else that it exists. In order to protest suffering, there has to be some sort of moral decision that

Comparing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion The Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929 and lasted for the next decade, was a time of desperation and disorientation in America. In an effort to bring the country back on its feet, President Roosevelt initiated the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project. Photographers were hired and sent across the United States to document Americans living in poverty, and Dorothea Lange and

a panic and ultimately gave rise to the largest economic downturn in US history. 15 million Americans lost their jobs. That figure is equivalent to about 25% of the country. These rough economic developments caused many people to make lifestyle changes. Walker Evans was a prominent photographer of the 1930's who is credited with releasing the first photo book showcasing American lifestyle. His book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is deemed by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential

Helpless The novel is autobiographical in the sense that it is about the death of Agee's father. However, it is also an important exploration of the city-country conflict that has characterized American experience from post Civil War days. During the lifetimes of many people ceased to exist. Well this was written in his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family where he goes into detail about the depressing feeling in losing someone in a accident. In the role that he plays in this work of literature

eternal life if they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The Bible has been in print and given to others for hundreds of years. The first King James Bible was published back in the year 1611. Within the King James Version, it used to contain what are now known as the canons. A biblical canon is a set or series of related books. The canons, within the King James Version, these were called the books of the apocrypha. Apocrypha means ‘hide away’ in Greek. The apocrypha is a collection of books that were

Dorothea Lange was a documentary photographer that was best know for the work she did with farm security administration also known as the FSA. She was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895, and studied photography at Columbia University. Then she went to pursue her career as a portrait photographer in San Francisco.              During the Great Depression she decided to take pictures outside of her studio and do it on the streets to report her findings. Her photos of the homeless and unemployed in

Sutter also wrote in his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies, that “the burden of southern environmental history, then, has been to reintroduce the environment as a casual force while avoiding the determinisms of the past.” In short, Sutter is presenting perhaps the biggest problem within environmental history which is environmental determinism. Environmental determinism meaning the idea that this environment is predisposed to act a certain way regardless and there was no way to avoid it. Sutter