Spence, Steven A.

Originally intended as light magazine journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book of photographs by Walker Evans and prose by James Agee, evolved into a complex work that exists on the boundaries of many genres, disciplines, and movements. The book is a documentary account of a month's stay with a family of Alabama tenant farmers in 1936. But it is simultaneously a challenge to claims of documentary realism, and to the assertions of knowledge and power that accompany those claims. Using modern theories of the documentary, as well as theories of postmodernism, this study traces the book's problematic relationship to "representation" as a textual and political strategy. I consider the interaction of words and images as one locus of ethical representation. The book's vision of just representation, I argue, can best be understood as an equal exchange involving author, reader, text, and the subjects of the representation.