Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is a photographic essay of life in thepoor rural South during the Great Depression. In it, master photographerWalker Evans and writer James Agee form a partnership to chronicle thelives of three families, the Gudgers, the Woods, and the Ricketts.However, the story is much more than simply the diary of people's dailylives. Agee writes, "I believe that every human being is potentiallycapable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; thatthis, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest,commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human worldcan assure itself" (Agee and Evans 307). Therefore, this moving book ispart chronicle, part social conscious, and part early reality television,combined to create a book that changed the way many looked at the poor andthe hungry during the Depression. Eventually, President Franklin D.Roosevelt saw the miscarriages between the poor and the still wealthy inthe country, and increase the tax burden on the wealthy to help equal out While Agee creates a moving essay on the dignity and promise ofAmerica's poor, the real meat of the book
There are few embellishments in thesehomes; the people are too concerned with survival. This book is a classic because itapproaches the subject differently - using photographs as their ownstatement, rather than an accompaniment to the text. This book changed social history, for it forced Americans toface the fact that people were living in third-world conditions in the mostpowerful nation on Earth. They alsoillustrate how important it is for the successful photographer tounderstand his subject before he takes a shot. Evans captures all ofthis with his lens, but shows the dignity of the people along with theirdestitute lifestyle. In addition, it showed the iron-willed strengthof these people, and brought about compassion rather than pity, and a senseof pride in the strength of all Americans. Evans recognized this, which is why herefused to caption the shots, simply allow them to stand on their own. These people are the backbone of ruralAmerica, and yet, until Agee and Evans book, most Americans could not admitthey existed. Evans uses different camera techniques quite effectively throughoutthe book. Every interior is stark and empty. lies in Evans' outstanding andmoving photography. Probably one of the most memorablephotos is the mother, sitting in the brightly lit doorway of her dark,gloomy home, comforting a cranky child. Inside the shacks islittle better - chairs with no seats, rusty wood stoves, and bare, raw woodwalls. Evans' lens masterfullycaptures just what it was like to live as a southern sharecropper in the1930s, and it is not a pretty sight.
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Acceptance Essays
