Academic

The Latest on Walker Evans and James Agee

By Alfred Brophy

... from our friends at the Tuscaloosa News, who're focusing on a controversy over Walker Evans' photographs, which appeared in Evans' and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 

Here's a taste of Ben Windham's terrific article:

Evans? and Agee?s sin, in the eyes of some local residents, was that they depicted a South radically different from the one that Margaret Mitchell romanticized four years earlier in ?Gone With the Wind.? Far from the marble pillars of Tara, the South of ?Famous Men? was as gnarly as the weathered boards of a sharecropper?s shack.

The book?s unflinching look at the bare-bones lives of poor Southern whites was too much for many locals. Their children and grandchildren may not have read the book but, like Scarlett O?Hara clutching a handful of Southern soil, they have held on to the bitterness that ?Famous Men? stirred in their families in the early ?40s.

Now Evans is under fire again, from a completely different direction. Some critics are accusing him of staging the photographs he took in Hale County and elsewhere during the Depression.

I'm skeptical of the criticism.

You might enjoy this Fortune article, which was published in 2005; it revisits the descendants of the families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  (Fortune had originally commissioned Evans and Agree to write an article for them, then refused to publish it -- and their work later became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)  For those of us who've spent time in Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, it's particularly moving.  Close readers of the Faculty Lounge will recall that we've spoken of Evans before.  And here, too.  And back at propertyprof,  too.

If you'd like to see more of Walker Evans' photographs, many are on the Library of Congress' Making of American website (in the Farm Security Administration page).  I take some pleasure in knowning that Evans was interested in cemeteries (like this one in Birmingham) and Civil War monuments (like this one in Vicksburg), too!

Two final thoughts.  First, the image is Walker Evans' photograph of a "Coca-Cola Shack" in Dallas County.  Second, close readers of the faculty lounge may recall that I spoke a lot about Greene County last summer when I was talking about antebellum trusts and estates -- Hale County was carved out of Greene County after the CivilWar.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 01, 2009 (boomark / email).