Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee & Walker Evans · 1941
Agee wrote and Evans photographed three Alabama sharecropper families during the Depression for Fortune magazine. Then the assignment mushroomed into this strange, beautiful, guilt-ridden meditation on poverty, observation, and the ethics of journalism. It failed commercially and became a masterpiece.
The case against
Agee's guilt is the loudest thing in the book. He inventories every board and nail of the sharecroppers' houses for pages, interrupts himself to agonize about the ethics of looking, and the agonizing keeps turning the camera back on Agee. Evans's photographs do in silence what the prose spends five hundred pages failing to settle.
Non-Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
