On Janet Malcolm's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa."

From Janet Malcolm's Diana & Nikon (1980)

Janet Malcolm was always comparing; it’s one of her signature analytical moves. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her great 1980 essay collection Diana and Nikon), she compared three versions of a famous Walker Evans portrait: (1) “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife” (1936), published in Evans’ American Photographs (1938); (2) untitled portrait, published in James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); and (3) “Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama” (1936), published in Walker Evans: First and Last (1978). Malcolm wrote,

The 1938 version shows a young woman of the most delicate, aristocratic beauty, with elegant bones, clear eyes, and smooth white skin, gazing confidently into the camera with a slight smile of humorous indomitability on her lips – a woman who, in her poverty, has the sort of profound beauty that her more fortunate sisters may envy but will seek in their hairdressers’ and dressmakers’. The version in Walker Evans: First and Last shows an ugly hag, her face covered with lines and wrinkles, her brow furrowed with anxiety, her mouth set in a bitter line, her eyes looking out in the expectation of seeing nothing good. What one feels looking at this portrait is no longer envy but outrage at the conditions that should have turned a beautiful woman into such a defeated and desexed being – a member of what James Agee, writing in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” The photograph of the sharecropper’s wife that appears in Agee’s book gives the same impression of beauty and indomitability as the one in American Photographs, even though it comes from the same negative that is used in the 1978 book. The poor printing of forty years ago did a cosmetic job, washing out lines, smoothing out the brow, minimizing the damage. The printer of the new book has performed an act of restitution, and his mercilessly scrutinizing prints are consequently more in line 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.”

This paragraph contains three arresting revelations: (1) there are three versions of this iconic photo; (2) the 1938 version is slightly different from the other two; and (3) the 1941 version – the one in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – is a “cosmetic” version of the one that appeared in 1978. Malcolm’s passage also contains an interesting opinion – that the 1978 “ugly hag” version is the one “more in line with Agee’s text.” Is Malcolm right? I don’t think so. 

In the text, Allie Mae Burroughs is named Annie May Gudger. At least twice, Agee describes her as beautiful:  

1. Saturday is the day of leaving the farm and going to Cookstown, and from the earliest morning on I can see that she is thinking of it. It is after she has done the housework in a little hurry and got the children ready that she bathes and prepares herself, and as she comes from the bedroom, with her hat on, ready to go, her eyes, in ambush even to herself, look for what I am thinking in such a way that I want to tell her how beautiful she is; and I would not be lying.

2. ... and now for the first time in all this hour we have sat here, Annie Mae takes her stiff hands from her ears and slowly lifts her beautiful face with a long strip of tears drawn, vertical, beneath each eye, and looks at us gravely, saying nothing.

It's true that Agee sees beauty in things that many people would consider ugly, e.g., a tenant farmer’s rough wooden shack, a tenant farmer’s worn overhauls. He eventually has this to say about his sense of beauty: 

They live on land, and in houses, and under skies and seasons, which all happen to seem to me beautiful beyond almost anything else I know, and they themselves, and the clothes they wear, and their motions, and their speech, are beautiful in the same intense and final commonness and purity.

The photo of Allie Mae Burroughs that Evans included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is very much in line with Agee’s sense of her beauty, as expressed in his text. Malcolm’s idea that the “ugly hag” version would’ve been a better match strikes me as wrong. I think it would’ve struck Evans and Agee that way, too. 

From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

 

"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.

Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

In Ian Frazier’s great On the Rez (2000), there’s a chapter on Indian bars. And in that chapter, there’s a sentence: “I walked around Buffalo Gap’s red dirt and gravel streets one summer afternoon awhile ago.” And that sentences leads to this description: 

The grain elevators by the railroad tracks were still active, with sparrows eating spills of grain on the ground nearby. Against the side of a building behind the elevator an assortment of galvanized-metal tanks of various sizes leaned on their sides, the ten-foot ones inside the twenty-foot ones inside the thirty-footers, like a set of nesting cups.

And that right there is why I love this book so much. Nosing around the little town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, Frazier is like an inspired street photographer – Eugène Atget, say, or Garry Winogrand – only instead of a camera, he uses a notebook. Anthony Lane said of Atget, “He stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice” (“A Balzac of the Camera,” The New Yorker, April 15, 1994). The same applies to Frazier. He’s a connoisseur of the overlooked and disregarded. He visits Buffalo Gap to check out a bar called the Stockman, where a twenty-two-year-old Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull was fatally stabbed in 1973. But Frazier is always looking for things to notice. The grain elevators catch his eye. Poking around them, he spies the galvanized-metal tanks, noting the way they’re put inside each other resembles a “set of nesting cups.” It’s the sort of incidental detail I relish.

Here’s another example from the same book. This time, Frazier is on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, visiting his friend Le War Lance. Frazier writes: 

On Sunday morning, I got up in my motel room at 4:30 and drove to Le’s to go hunting. I took the back road from Chadron and saw one other car in thirty-eight miles. I was aware of the dusty smell of the car heater, the staticky uselessness of the radio, and the veering of the headlights back and forth across the darkness as the car swerved through the windings of the road. When I pulled into Le’s driveway, I turned off the engine and the lights and stood for a while in the darkness beside the car and looked at the stars. One problem the Pine Ridge Reservation does not have is light pollution. The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot.

That image of Frazier standing in the darkness beside his car, observing the stars, is marvelously fine. The ending – “The stars were like bullet holes, the galaxies like patterns of birdshot” – is like an epiphany.

One more example of Frazier’s superb noticing, this from On the Rez’s chapter 15, in which Frazier again visits Le War Lance on Pine Ridge Reservation:

At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it, but it was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains.

How I love that passage! The bit about Le’s oily thumbprints on the sandwich makes me smile every time I read it. On the Rez abounds with such passages. Like James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it’s an “effort in human actuality” (Agee’s words). It’s also a brilliant evocation of the Pine Ridge Reservation. I treasure it.

October 13, 2014 Issue

A special shout-out to the editors of this week’s “Money Issue” for including two excellent pieces on what James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “human actuality.” The “human actuality” in Lauren Hilgers’ “The Kitchen Network” is the hardscrabble existence of a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese immigrant named Rain, working twelve-hour shifts six days a week in a strip mall Chinese restaurant on Maryland’s Indian Head Highway. Hilgers conveys a deep interest in what is actual – the Fujianese village where Rain grew up, the way in which he was smuggled into the U.S., the Chinatown employment agencies, the restaurant where he works, the house he shares with five co-workers, even the way he thinks (“So, instead of conversation, Rain occupies himself with the math of a transient cook: the time it takes to clean the shrimp, the days before he can visit his girlfriend in New York, and the balance of his debts”).

The human actuality in Peter Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” can be summed up in three words: women, money, and garbage. The way these three things are connected in Hessler’s piece is a revelation. Hessler’s subject is Sayyid Ahmid, a Cairo garbageman. Ahmid collects garbage from Hessler’s apartment. Occasionally, Hessler accompanies him on his rounds. Reading the first three sections, I thought the story was going to be about Cairo’s “informal economy.” As Hessler shows, “Cairo’s waste collection is shaped by tradition, not by laws and planning.” But in the following sections, after Hessler and his wife visit Sayyid in his home, the piece branches in a different direction, showing how Sayyid’s sexist views (e.g., he supports female circumcision) are a product of Islamic tradition that limits desire to males.

Considering these two pieces from a compositional perspective, I find myself slightly more partial to Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash.” Its mix of subjective and objective is richer. Both articles are absorbing. Both emphasize, in an Agee-like way, human particularity.

The Humble Actual: Forrestall, Nowlan & Bishop

Four full pails of grain on a cement floor bathed in a golden brown light – such are the particulars of a photograph taken by our seven-year-old son, Lauchie, many years ago, on a visit to Clark’s farm in North Wiltshire, P.E.I. We (my wife and I) had the photo enlarged and framed. For several years, it hung in the hallway of our home on Palmer’s Lane. When we moved, it got packed away, and never really saw the light of day again until recently, when I brought it up from the basement of the place we live in now, and set it on a table next to my desk. I’m looking at it now, as I write this. Not everyone liked it. I remember one of my wife’s cousins looking at it, when she visited Palmer’s Lane, and wondering aloud, “What’s so great about four grain buckets?” When I told her that Lauchie had taken the photo when he was a kid, she nodded, perhaps slightly altering her perception of the picture, seeing it now as a family keepsake. I didn’t say anything more than that. I didn’t try to argue its artistic merits. But the truth is, I like Lauchie’s photo for more than just sentimental reasons. I like it for the same reason I’m drawn to Van Gogh’s painting of worn shoes, Walker Evans’s shots of roadhouse shacks, James Agee’s inventories of sharecroppers’ possessions (“A cracked roseflowered china shaving mug, broken along the edge … A pink crescent celluloid comb: twenty-seven teeth, of which three are missing”) – they represent the humble actual.

I thought of Lauchie’s “grain bucket” photo the other day as I leafed through a remarkable book titled Shaped by This Land (1974) by the painter Tom Forrestall and the poet Alden Nowlan. The dust jacket shows two dented old oil drums, used for burning trash, their thick orange rust almost palpable, standing in a wild entanglement of brush and wheat-colored grass. It’s an enlarged detail from Forrestall’s superb Backyard (1971), a shaped panel, consisting of two circular egg temperas, one above the other, the top piece a close-up of a boy climbing a leafless tree, and the bottom one depicting the oil drums, behind which are two bare-limbed trees, one holding a crate-like tree house.

Forrestall’s oil drums have, for me, a Proustian reverberation. I recall trips my family made, when I was a kid, to my Uncle Guy’s hunting camp on Berry Brook, deep in the Restigouche watershed of northern New Brunswick. Uncle Guy and my father caught trout in the brook. Aunt Joyce gutted the trout and fried them up. I remember the smells of fried fish, pancakes, bacon, kerosene, beer, wood smoke, all intermingling inside that rough-hewn, tarpapered cabin. Amber-colored fly-catcher strips dangled from the rafters. Outside in the yard, not too far from the brook, there was an oil drum just like Forrestall’s, in which Uncle Guy burned brush and garbage.

Rusty oil drums, crumbly brick walls, disused rails, tumbledown fences, felled tree limbs, an old wood furnace, abandoned farm equipment, derelict farm houses, dank basements, antique oil lamps, gravel pits, split firewood, gravestones, battered milk cans, left over hay, dried wasps’ nest, kitchen woodstove – these are some of the glorious subjects of Shaped by This Land’s bleak, detailed, melancholy, ravishing Forrestall egg temperas, watercolours, and pencil drawings.

But whoa! Let’s go back to that wasps’ nest for a minute. Forrestall isn’t the only artist who treasured such a thing. Elizabeth Bishop, in her wonderful “Santarém,” wrote about finding an empty wasps’ nest in a Brazilian pharmacy:

In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist

had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf:

small, exquisite, clean matte white,

and hard as stucco. I admired it

so much he gave it to me.

Then – my ship’s whistle blew. I couldn’t stay.

Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan,

Dutch, the retired head of Philips Electric,

really a very nice old man,

who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,

asked, “What’s that ugly thing?”

What’s that ugly thing? – a question similar to the one my wife’s cousin asked when she saw Lauchie’s “grain buckets” photo. Obviously, she wasn’t transported by the humble actual the way Bishop was. Bishop wrote poems about fishhouses (“The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs / and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up / to storerooms in the gables”), stumps and dead trees (“On stumps and dead trees the charring is like black velvet”), a home-made flute (“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”), a service station (“Oh, but it is dirty! / - this little filling station, / oil-soaked, oil-permeated / to a disturbing, over-all / black transparency”). She even wrote about a moose (“A moose has come out of / the impenetrable wood / and stands there, looms, rather, / in the middle of the road. / It approaches; it sniffs at / the bus’s hot hood”).

Alden Nowlan has a sensibility similar to Bishop’s, except that his is deep-dyed Maritimes. He, too, wrote moose poems, at least two of them – “The Bull Moose” and “Chance Encounter.” Some of his other subjects include hens, horse troughs, woodsheds, gum rubbers, pulpwood, straw-filled bunks, tamarack swamps, boardinghouses, all-night diners. Like Forrestall and Bishop, he’s a superb noticer of the extraordinary in the quotidian. For example, in “And He Wept Aloud, So That the Egyptians Heard It,” he observes the “houseflies big as bumblebees / playing crazy football / in the skim-coloured windows, / leap-frogging from / the cracked butter saucer / to our tin plates of / rainbow trout and potatoes, catching the bread on its way to our mouths, / mounting one another / on the rough deal table.” In “Pussywillows in March,” he notes the pussywillows’ “strange loveliness,” their “mud-coloured stalks / and the little blossoms / in their leathery pouches.” And in “On the Barrens,” he notices “the teapot on the stove as long as / anyone was awake, / mittens and socks left to thaw on / the open oven door, / chunks of pine and birch piled / halfway to the ceiling, / and always a faint smell of smoke / like spice in the air, / the lamps making their peace with / the darkness, / the world not entirely answerable / to man.”

My favorite Nowlan poem is “Stoney Ridge Dance Hall,” about the “Eight generations of Hungerfords, McGards and Staceys,” who have “lived on this ridge / like incestuous kings.” The fourth stanza reads:

When they tire of dancing

they go down the road

and drink white lightning

out of the bung

of a molasses puncheon.

That “drink white lightning / out of the bung / of a molasses puncheon” shows an avid realism.

In Shaped by This Land, Nowlan’s poems are matched with Forrestall’s pictures. One memorable pairing is Nowlan’s “Bull Moose” with Forrestall’s McMonicle’s Moose, a shaped panel consisting of two egg temperas, one showing three rusty oil drums, a glass jug, and a big round piece of firewood that might be used as a chopping block; the other panel depicting two skinned moose carcasses hanging in a barn.

Tom Smart, in his absorbing Tom Forrestall: Paintings, Drawings, Writings (2008), calls Shaped by This Land “a unique book.” He says,

Collage-like, it presents groupings of painting and poetry related by common imagery, themes, or mood. The poems seem to give Forrestall’s pictures depth of meaning and metaphor that is not immediately evident, and the narrative character of Nowlan’s poetry suits the latent prosaic quality of the painted images. However, while reinforcing the narrative dimensions of the paintings, the poems close down other readings.

Smart goes on to praise the pairing of Nowlan’s “The Coat” with Forrestall’s The West Nova Scotians, observing that “the juxtaposition informs both poem and painting, expanding the meaning of both.” But he repeats his criticism, saying, “Generally, however, the pairings, based on superficial resemblances, limit rather than enhance interpretation.”

I’m not sure Smart is right about the poems “closing down other readings.” Smart seems to treat the poems as if they’re annotations, like wall commentary at an exhibition. But, in my view, they’re more like a literary equivalent of Forrestall’s mood. Nowlan’s poems are “Forrestallesque” and Forrestall’s paintings are “Nowlanesque,” but with this difference: Forrestall’s pictures are often unpeopled; Nowlan’s poems brim with characters – Janice Smith, John Fynch, Georgie and Fenwick Cranston, Cecelia Cameron, Nancy Lynn O’Malley, Henry Ferguson, Mary-Beth McGuire, Standish Morehouse, Jack Stringer, Andy Shaw, Warren Pryor, on and on. In his book, Smart observes that Forrestall’s “interiors and landscapes reflected a sense of emptiness … enhanced by the fact that human presence was intimated only by the things left behind.” Nowlan’s poems afford vital, fascinating glimpses of the people who once lived in those places and used those things.

Shaped by This Land lives in its particulars – the wintering flies, whale oil lamp, “porcupine-sunk porch,” church land, pole-fenced pasture, cut-open squash, grafted tree, “hands that stink from milking.” There aren’t any grain pails in it. But there could be. Lauchie’s image would fit right in with Nowlan’s molasses puncheon and Forrester’s oil drums, highly particularized representations of things as they are - the humble actual.

Postscript: To my knowledge, neither Alden Nowlan nor Tom Forrestall ever appeared in The New Yorker. I rely on Elizabeth Bishop’s strong connection with the magazine to justify posting the above essay to this blog. For example, her great “At the Fishhouses,” which I quote in my piece, was published in the August 9, 1947, New Yorker. Bishop had the Maritimes in her veins. She lived in Nova Scotia with her grandparents from the age of three to the age of six. She then left to be raised by an aunt in Massachusetts, but spent summers in Nova Scotia until she was thirteen. Interestingly, she mentions, in her “The Moose,” the Tantramar Marshes (“The Tantramar marshes / and the smell of salt hay”). According to Tom Smart’s book, those marshes are among the places where Forrestall painted when he was a Fine Art student at Mount Allison University (1954-58).

October 28, 2013 Issue

Ian Frazier has a great egalitarian eye for what James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, called “human actuality.” In his brilliant “Hidden City,” in this week’s issue, Frazier notices, among other specific details, “two young men, one in a hoodie despite the heat and the other in a clean, tight white T-shirt and a black do-rag, with the tie ends dangling;” “a single key, unattached to any chain, key ring or other keys;” floors “like the insides of old suitcases”; “bent window blinds”; “tragic, drooping, bright-green shower curtain”; “ivory polish on her fingernails and toenails”; strollers (“Plastic bags of possessions drape the stroller handles, sippy cups of juice fill the cup-holders, Burger King paper crowns ride in the carrying racks beneath”); smell (“Breakfast had just ended and a smell of syrup lingered in the air); Saratoga Family Inn homeless shelter (“Fencing topped with barbed wire surrounds the building on several sides, and large banners advertising a slip-and-fall attorney and an auto-leasing place hang from its windowless six-story front”); sound (“constantly you hear the tires bumping on an approach ramp to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge above it”); clothing (“He was wearing a pair of trousers that appeared to be riding very low, as the style now has it, but actually they were an optical illusion. The boxer shorts at the top of the trousers were a part of the garment itself”); an East Harlem street (“Cardboard lay scattered here and there and some ring-billed gulls were picking up French fries”); more sound (“In the warm Saturday-night air the city was hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-like laughter”); the homeless (“In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed could capture only a person’s blurry passing”).

These are particulars that not everyone sees, perhaps because they have no interest in seeing them. “We notice what we notice in accordance with who we are,” Robert Coles says in Doing Documentary Work (1997). Frazier is an egalitarian; he looks neither up nor down at his subjects. “Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody,” the title of his wonderful profile of the household hint columnist Poncé Cruse Evans (The New Yorker, February 21, 1983), could stand as his motto – a democratic way of seeing (and writing) that “Hidden City” magnificently embodies from beginning to end.