Michael A. Vuksta
During the years that I have been teaching photography to teenagers and younger people, an event like the one described in the opening paragraphs has repeatedly occurred in my classroom. While my teaching has sought the creation of photographs for public viewing rather than the more private context described above, this inability to provide meaning and context to photographs becomes exaggerated in the creation of these more public images.
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With this in mind, I have sought to create a curriculum unit that will increase and deepen my students knowledge of and relationship to photographs and words (texts, both oral and written) in order to concomitantly enhance and intensify their knowledge of and relationship to each other and themselves.
The photographs and texts which I have selected will increase the students selfexpression by strengthening their vocabulary and communication skills in photography, literature, and history. To do this, I have chosen the photo text
Let US Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee and Walker Evans.
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Published in 1941 and reissued with an expanded photographic selection in 1960, this photo text represents an unique yet characteristic style of presentation of the 1930’s. It both adapts and explodes the documentary expressions that proliferated during this decade. It conforms to others of its kind only in that it uses both mediums to record and express experience. Yet, it explodes this genre of documentary in the way it combines the image and the word. Agee explains, “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”
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However, the work of Agee and Evans does accept the then prevalent notion that the camera is the unique and quintessential medium for objectively portraying truth, reality and actuality.
Other photo texts of this period openly employed an illustrative use of photographs, or conversely, an “illustrative” use of words as captions for photographs.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
seeks to avoid diminishing either medium by admitting to the uniqueness of each. A greater accomplishment is achieved by both photographing an event and writing about it. The sensitivity of the photographic eye, when achieved by the writer, enables him to see more; and vice versa, the exploration of the writer clarifies the photograph.
Early in the text Agee exposes his acceptance of the efficacy of photography to express actuality most accurately:
For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned . . . with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is. . . .
This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.
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What is also unique about this masterpiece of documentary art is Agee’s spirited subjectivity and sentient self-consciousness. Yet, strangely, Agee says of the text:
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food . . . As a matter of fact, nothing I might write could make any difference whatever.
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The method by which I would present this curriculum unit echoes the sentiments Agee expresses here. Both the writer and the photographer use their process as a means of discovery. It is the process that is important; the end product of photograph or text is but evidence of their discovery. Thus, I would ask you to discover on your own what I have, by handing you. . .
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
And given Agee’s suggestion we would read it aloud as a group in the course of our daily existence.
I would also issue:
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Laurence Bergreen’s
James Agee: A Life
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Walker Evans’s
American Photographs
and
First and Last
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James Agee’s
A Death in the Family
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Along with an annotated list of selections and notes from the other sources from my bibliography, I would simply present you with the documentary evidence which is the part and process by which this unit came together. I might also include in this list:
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the scraps of crumpled paper
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empty ink cartridges
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crumpled napkins
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half soiled salad plates and drinking glasses, complete with:
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a flotilla of insects in melting ice
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I might also present you with:
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photographs of the view outside my study window
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or
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the samplings of graffiti from the halls and stalls of the library.
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What would remain hidden or unexpressed are the magical wildflower walks of early June (taken together with a loved one); the quiet dinners on my front porch with friends sharing ideas about photography and writing. If the circle of inclusion were to grow narrower, you might catch the glint in my eye as an insight flickered through my mind and escaped from my mouth in the conversations on my front porch. And if this circle were to grow wider, I might reveal the image of a dream in which my entire consciousnessbeing became as ubiquitous, as commonplace and as tenuous as light reflecting on the surface of a lake, not so much when this water is placid with the image of what is around its banks invertedly reflected in it; but rather like the light as it instantaneously splatters across this surface when it is disturbed.
It is this which I would offer to my students: an inquiry into the process of photography and writing that will open them to themselves. All I can do for them is hope to inspire a process of selfdiscovery.
You may now be questioning: “Why?” “Why should I go on with this?” “Why this selfdisclosure?” “ Why this self-indulgence?” I offer not my own words but those of William S. Condon:
[I]t seems essential that we share a common order, that we
are
aspects of natural structure; otherwise it would not be possible for us to eat, drink, breathe, perceive, and know. . . . Human communication . . . is a multistructural realm within which we exist and of which we are composed. . . . There is a traditional view that human beings are separate individuals and that communication occurring between them is ‘outside of’ them . . . Yet it seems to be ordered in all its manifestations. The distinction between human
and
nature is difficult to maintain. It is similar to saying the sun
and
nature, or the sky
and
nature. When one person communicates with another person, it is also simultaneously an interaction with and within nature.
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