"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" 's Beautiful Marriage of Photos and Text

Photo by Walker Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Jefferson Hunter, in his Image and Word (1987), contends that the photos and text of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) “work against” each other. He says, “One might, perhaps, think of the text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an enormously expanded, limit-defying caption, but it is a caption working against the Evans photographs.”

Hunter isn’t the first to make this point. Janet Malcolm, in her superb “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her Diana & Nikon, 1980), writes,

This has always been the problem with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

Malcolm attributes the disparity between the testimony of Evans’s photos and that of Agee’s text to “photography’s inadequacy as a describer of how things are.” She says, “The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.”

Anthony Lane, in his brilliant “Eye of the Land” (The New Yorker, March 13, 2000; retitled “Walker Evans” in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect), takes a different view. He says, “Agee’s mission succeeds only when it starts to approach the condition of a Walker Evans photograph.” And what is that condition? The best description of it that I’ve read is by John Szarkowski:

Evans’s work seemed at first almost the antithesis of art: It was puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual, qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeepers ledger than to art. But in time it became clear that Evans’s pictures, however laconic in manner, were immensely rich in expressive content. [Looking at Photographs, 1973]

Agee’s prose is the equivalent of unpacked Evans photos – their expressive content spilled across the page in line after line of exquisite description. For example:

The front porch of oak two-by-twelves so hard they still carry a strong piercing fell of splinters; the four supporting posts which have the delicate bias and fluences of young trees and whose surface is close to that of rubbed ivory; in the musculatures of their stripped knots they have the flayed and expert strength of anatomical studies: and the rest of the house entirely of pine, the cheapest of local building material and of this material one of the cheapest grades: in the surfaces of these boards are three qualities of beauty and they are simultaneous, mutually transparent: one is the streaming killed strength of the grain, infinite, talented, and unrepeatable from inch to inch, the florid genius of nature which is incapable of error: one of the close-set transverse arcs, dozens to the foot, which are the shadows of the savage breathings and eatings of the circular saw; little of this lumber has been planed: one is the tone and quality the weather has given it, which is related one way to bone, another to satin, another to unpolished but smooth silver: all these are visible at once, though one or another may be strongly enhanced by degree and direction of light and by degree of humidity: moreover, since the lumber is so cheap, knots are frequent and here and there among the knots the iron-hard bitter red center is lost, and there is, instead, a knothole; the grain near these knots goes into convulsions or ecstasies such as Beethoven’s deafness compelled; and with these knots the planes of the house are badged at random, and again moreover, these wild fugues and floods of grain, which are of the free perfect innocence of nature, are sawn and stripped across into rigid ribbons and by rigid lines and boundaries, in the captive perfect innocence of science, so that these are closely collaborated and inter-involved in every surface: and at points strategic to structure: and regimented by need, and attempting their own symmetries, yet not in perfect line (such is the tortured yet again innocence of men, caught between the pulls of nature and science), the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails: and all these things, set in the twisted and cradling planet, take the benefit of every light and weather which the sky in their part of the world can bestow, this within its terms being subtly unrepeatable and probably infinite, and are qualified as few different structures can be, to make full use of these gifts. By most brief suggestions: in full symmetry of the sun, the surfaces are dazzling silver, the shadows strong as knives and India ink, yet the grain and all detail clear: in slanted light, all slantings and sharpenings of shadow; in smothered light, the aspect of bone, a relic; at night, the balanced masses, patient in the base world; from rain, out of these hues of argent bone the colors of agate, the whole wall, one fabric and mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks: and in the sheltered yet open hallway, a granite gray and seeming of nearly granitic hardness, the grain dim, the sawmarks very strong; in the strength of these marks and peculiar sobriety of the color, a look as if there has been a slow and exact substitution of calcium throughout all the substance: within the rooms, the wood holds much nearer its original colors of yellows, reds, and peasant golds drawn deep toward gray, yet glowing quietly through it as the clay world glows through summer.

Wow! Is it too much? All Agee is describing is a crude sharecropper shack. But that’s just the point. In the knots and nails and boards of this poor no-account dwelling, which many might dismiss as an eyesore, Agee sees beauty – “wild fugues and floods of grain,” “the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails,” “shadows strong as knives and India ink,” “argent bone,” “mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks”!  

Maybe Malcolm is right; the pen is mightier than the camera. But I don’t think so. Everything Agee describes is enfolded, concentrated in Evans’s photos. (“They do not illustrate so much as distill,” Lane says.) Agee opens them up, filters their subjects through his own vast, acute, photographic sensibility – so sensitive to light, shadow, and texture.

I don’t buy the view that the photos and text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men disagree. Yes, their styles differ from each other. Evans’s photos are austere; Agee’s prose is lavish. But they both show a reverence for the humble actual. That, to me, is what matters most.