Three Tengle Children (2). Hale County, Alabama

Walker Evans was born in 1903 and after an unfinished education he spent time in the 1920s Paris world of the many famous writers and artists who took up residence there. Returning to America in the late 1920s he took up photography in 1928 and it afforded him the opportunity to live, as he said, "very shabbily" in New York City. Evans worked for what was to be the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and his ideas about the systematic documentation of American culture impressed and influenced Roy Stryker, head of the Photographic Unit at FSA. During the eighteen months or so that he worked at the agency, he photographed principally in the South in a style he called "pure record not propaganda."

In 1936 Walker Evans and the writer, James Agee, went to Hale County, Alabama, on an assignment from Fortune magazine to do a story on the lives of sharecropper families in the cotton belt. The families, headed by kinsman Frank Tengle, Floyd Burroughs and Bud Fields, lived on adjacent properties. Evans and Agee stayed several weeks and eventually produced one of the seminal photo essay???s on American life, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His iconic Depression-era portraits of the families formed much of the American public???s collective visual consciousness of the Great Depression. The FSA photographers were widely published all through the Depression, and captured their own great and significant images, particularly Dorothea Lange, but none focused on a single theme with such powerful iconic images and editorial writing as Evans and Agee.

Agee's original draft of the article was very long and after a time the editors at Fortune finally gave up on it. Houghton Mifflin, the publisher, recognized ???a work of great oddity and power, with passages worthy of comparison to some of Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau.?????? In August, 1941, five years after the trip to Alabama, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was published to much criticism and low book sales. It was re-published in 1961 and has stayed in print since then.

Evans's photographs in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" are merciless and unsentimental. He captures the simple but significant gestures of sharecropper living, the total poverty of a whole class of peoples in the United States. While much of the FSA effort had propaganda as an agenda, these photographs did not propagandize poverty and squalor, they presented the reality of a life that existed long before America was in the Great Depression. This powerful collaboration by Evans and Agee is considered one of the most unique and penetrating works in American culture. The images present a stunning impression that can linger in the mind even if you try to forget them. Evans study of American culture covered the period from the late 1920s through the early 1970s. Evans gave only the sparest praise to his predecessors influence on him but Douglas Nickel, the critic said his ???socially engaged, documentary-style photography, made the work of Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston possible."

Evans later served as an editor of photography for Time magazine (1943 to 1945) and later for Fortune (1945 to 1965). James Agee died in 1955 and Evans in 1975.

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