The Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Photographs
in two contexts:
1) Early 20th c. Photography
2) Depression-era Documentary
Daniel Griesbach
February 19, 2008
For Timothy Welsh’s English 200,
“Reading Literature, Reading Reality”
Sources Online
• The photographs we saw (and many more) are available from
the UW library. Some are also available online:
• Lewis Hine’s child labor photographs
– http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/nclchtml/nclcabt.html
• Alfred Stieglitz
– http://www.geh.org/fm/stieglitz/htmlsrc/stieglitz_sld00001.html
• Dorothea Lange
– http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap03.html
• Library of Congress’s FSA digital collection
– Search for “Lange” or “Evans” at:
– http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html
Early 20th century U.S. photography:
Alfred Stieglitz
• Succeeded in making photography a
legitimate art (like painting).
• Displayed photography alongside other works
of art in his own art gallery, “291.”
• Published a photography journal, “Camera
Work.”
• Formed a circle of photographers, the “PhotoSecessionists”
Early 20th century U.S. photography:
Alfred Stieglitz
• “The Picasso-Braque-African Carving
Exhibition at 291,” 1915: photograph of his
studio w/modern art
• Stieglitz “The Terminal” 1915: New York street
scene
• “The Steerage” 1915: upper and lower deck of
ship. Commentary on social class or an
experiment in formal composition?
Early 20th century U.S. photography:
Lewis Hine
Photographs for the National Child Labor
Committee. Children working as
• “street trades”: newsies, bootblacks,
messengers
• Miners (e.g., coal mines)
• Factory (e.g., textiles)
• Agriculture (e.g., cotton) and Canneries
“Stieglitz Perfected”:
Edward Steichen’s Pictorialism
• Photographs which through their use of color
and texture most resemble modern paintings
• “Rodin” 1901: highly stylized profile of the
sculptor w/his work in background.
• “After the Grand Prix” Paris, 1907: striking
contrasts of light and dark to emphasize the
women’s dress, reminiscent of paintings by
Degas
Image and Text:
Lewis Hine’s exhibition Panels
• A contrast with Stieglitz gallery, Hine’s touring
exhibit tried to convince people of the need
for child labor laws.
• Photographs arranged with text, often to
suggest what happens to the children in the
photographs, their life experiences
In sum: precedents from early 20th c.
photography
• Photography as High Art vs. photography to
raise social awareness/effect change
– Can both photographers be called “artists”?
• The relationship between photograph and text
– Steichen’s brief and vague captions shift focus on
the image itself: “Profile,” “Rodin,” “The Flatiron”
– Hine’s descriptive/informative captions and
exhibit panel “stories” add more information
Depression-era Documentary:
Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Workers
• Dustbowl migration as depression-story: pictures
of ruined Midwestern farms and migrating
families.
• Pictures of field laborers, individually and in large
groups.
• Captions often tell the migrants’ stories, as well
as details of exploitative wages and working
conditions
• “Migrant Mother” is her most famous work, and
a useful comparison with Evans.
Depression-era Documentary:
Margaret Bourke-White’s Grotesques
• Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen
Their Faces (1936) was a popular documentary book.
• Photographs are exaggerated, extremes misery and social
“types” in the sharecropping south.
• Drastic camera angles elevating and diminishing the subject.
• Captions, often made-up quotations of the photographed
subject, controversial among other documentary artists in this
period.
• Agee inserts an article about Bourke-White in his appendix,
which he means his readers to take as an unflattering account
of a photographer who does not respect her subjects -- “snuff,
religion, and patent medicine” (pp. 398-401).
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
• How is the book put together?
– It starts with just the pictures.
– The pictures are continuous until they’re finished.
(Image and text do not overlap in any way).
– In other words, the text and image are “coequal,
mutually independent, and fully collaborative”
(Preface, p. xi).
– There are neither captions nor any device for easily
identifying the content of the photographs (which
families, etc.)
– It’s frustrating: as consumers of images, we are used
to being told what we’re looking at.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
• The arrangement of the images
– There is a division, more or less, between people
and buildings.
• Evans is known for his direct, level, “head on”
style, whether it’s a person or a building in
front of the camera.
• Patterns of separating: the book split into
photographs and words, the photographs split
roughly into people and buildings.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
• The arrangement of the images
– There is a division, more or less, between people
and buildings (continued).
• Evans added most of the pictures of the
buildings in the 1960 republication;
• He used a similar person/building pattern in his
1938 book, American Photographs.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
• Evans’s style is characterized by subtlety and
ambiguity, even while the images are sharp
and realistic.
– Contrast Evans’s sharecropper portraits with those
taken by Dorothea Lange and Margaret BourkeWhite
– Example of Annie Mae Gudger
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
• Evans is described by some as “distant,”
”analytical,” “removed,” “objective.”
– Side angle & hidden cameras (later in his career).
– Evans = “objective”; Agee = “subjective”?
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
The Photographs
The photographs can be seen as emphasizing:
– Individuals: “George Gudger is a human being, a
man, not like any other human being as he is like
himself” (p. 205)
– Families: “A man and a woman are drawn together
upon a bed and there is a child and there are
children” (p. 49)
Agee and Evans: Art or social
commentary or . . . something else ?
• In an essay early in his
career, Evans complained
of photographs of “misty
October lanes, snow
scenes, reflets dans l’eau,
young girls with crystal
balls,” implying that
photography cannot or
should not limit itself to
portraying conventionally
beautiful or romanticized
subjects.
• Agee states in Famous
Men: “Above all else: in
God’s name, don’t think
of it as Art.”