Michael A. Vuksta
In its traditional observation mode, photography reduces truth to fact and implicitly suppresses ‘the social function of subjectivity.’
—Carol Shloss
No picture can simultaneously record a face and dramatize the photographer’s personal relations with the owner of the face.
—Jefferson Hunter
The medium of photography has an affinity for the indeterminate . . . it simply fails to tell us anything about his [read one’s] behavior in general or his typical attitude. It so radically isolates a momentary pose. . . that the function of this pose within the personality remains everybody’s guess. The pose relates to a context which itself is not given. Photographs . . . transmit raw material without refining it.
—Siegfreid Kracauer
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In all of Book I there are sixtytwo photographs. In seven of them we come facetoface with seven members of the tenant families. Four others provide a frontal view of three-quarters of their bodies. In still two others we confront the full bodies, once again facing directly into our eyes. When Evans turns his camera toward the buildings on the farms and in the nearby roadsides and cities, he focuses on their facades. It is in the remaining photographs—taken in the interiors of these families’ homes or ones taken of the backs of people at work in the fields or driving their carts to the cotton gin—that we begin to glimpse the potential deeper meaning that the title of this work seems to indicate.
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It is from two other photographs that I think we begin to receive some suggestion that we are to look and read beyond and into the faces and lives presented to our view. In one of the photographs that I am referring to, we see an infant lying on a white cloth on the cabin floor. The infant is completely covered with another white, somewhat coarse cloth that hides all but the two legs below the knees and a single arm below the elbow. The child’s left foot and ankle is wrapped in gauze. The child’s face and the remainder of its entire body is invisible to us. The other photograph which holds a rather cryptic significance is the final one of this series. In it we see a clear sky with billowing clouds as the background to a mysterious construction. This foregrounded construct is composed of a slender vertical stick transversed by another horizontal member from which four gourds are suspended. The detail is once again precise (as one has grown accustomed to expect from Evans). It is this strange cipher which introduces us to the four hundred and twenty eight pages of text which follows. I believe that these two photographs could provide us with some insight into the title of this work and into the purpose of the emerging text.
The title of this photo text is taken from a piece of Wisdom Literature selected from one of the Apocryphal texts of the Old Testament, specifically Ecclesiasticus. (This selection appears in its entirety on pages 405 and 406 of Book II). There are many meanings which have accrued to the word ‘apocryphal’. The meaning which I will choose to emphasize for understanding Agee’s text is that of sacred wisdom thought to be too mysterious or esoteric to be disclosed to any but the initiated. The word is made up of the prefix
apo
, meaning away from, off, detached or separate and the Greek word
kryptein
, meaning to hide. It is related to the word cryptic which means, hidden, covered, invisible, latent, occult, secret and private. And if one were to extend one’s investigation into other word combinations of the root crypt, such as in the word cryptographer, we discover traces of a code, a cipher, or the art of deciphering. In many ways Agee’s text has provided not only a context for but a deciphering of the photographs and people we met in Book I.
Upon reading Book II in its entirety, one may be perplexed by the variety of observations, physical descriptions and conceptual discourses on writing which Agee presents. In my own discourse which follows, I will focus on a single particular aspect of these investigations. What may have become obvious to the reader is that the subject of this book is not only the sharecroppers of Alabama, but a book about the author himself. As I stated earlier, this is a very selfconscious text. It is not only an examination of the lives of these southern farmers, but a commentary on the nature of the writer and his relationship to the camera, writing and the people whose lives he is disrupting.
One might, perhaps, think of the text of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
as an enormously expanding caption, but it is a caption working against Evans’s photographs. Agee’s prose . . . is . . . strongly metaphorical, repetitive, rhythmically assertive, and above all self-conscious. It draws attention to itself. Selfconsciousness is for Agee . . . what cotton farming is for the tenant families.
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In contrast to his confidence about photography and the camera’s ability to present the truth, language and writing are suspect in their ability to convey actuality. Agee cautions us that we are to be suspicious of ‘description’.
‘Human beings and their creations (other than art) and the entire state of nature,’ he wrote, ‘merely are the truth.’ This truth, he said, ‘words cannot embody; they can only describe.’ Consequently, it was the business of the serious writer—the poet as Agee called him—to ‘continually bring . . . words as near as he can to the illusion of embodiment.’ . . . to bring words more closely into correspondence with the truth, Nature, the world.
He realized that final correspondence was impossible: the dissociation of word and object meant that reality, the truth, couldn’t be told . . . The world is finally incommunicable.
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Yet, in reading Book II, one notices that Agee’s powers of description are impeccable, equaling, if not surpassing Evans’s photographs in breadth and depth, if not in appearance. His eyes are capable of going where no camera is capable of intruding, in drawers and even underneath the house. His pen is capable of describing these repositories of hidden artifactual texts with verbal, visual and conceptual power. It will also be potent enough to speculate upon the consciousness of the writer, the photographer and the observed. (In the
ACTIVITIES
section at the end of this essay I will list some passages of Agee’s pure precise description that I will use for my students’ investigations into the language of description. Some of these selections are intended as commentaries on or expansions of particular photographs from Book I, others describe subtleties and nuances which escape photographic exploration.)
Carol Shloss in her analysis of writers and photographers emphasizes Agee’s curiosity about the camera and suggests that his “struggle with the camera forms a coherent, powerful subtext, an underground commentary”.
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Her interpretation of this book focuses on how Evans’s photographic process offered a model for Agee’s own creative efforts. She states that
the photographs were the commanding text. . . they provided the light by which Agee understood his own creativity, his own humanity, and his lack of it. . . . he saw [in Evans] a visible tableau of his own position in the world, the hidden and secretive probing of the writer made tangible, its effects on others exposed.
For Evans, standing openly with his camera, provided a visible tableau of a more hidden dynamic; he showed Agee as graphically as possible that art could be built on face-to-face encounters, that in these matters, personal influence, however profound or dangerous, could be reciprocal.
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Therefore, in his writing about the tenants he concentrates on what they have and not on what they lack. And these things are valuable because they are used. In contrast to the actuality and beauty of the tenants lives, Agee employs what he considers an inadequate imitation, language. In doing so,
He exposed himself infinitely more than he did the tenants. . . . He presented himself as he was: an actual man of complex personality in real relation with other actual inaccessible people.
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And to him this “selfexposure justified the exposure of others.”
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What he [Agee] was trying to do in recording ‘the cruel radiance of what is’ was ultimately beyond anybody’s ability to achieve . . . To him the unseen animal represented the mystery of everything that lay outside the lens or language: it had a beauty and sadness he could only suggest.
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Perhaps it is appropriate that
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
is two books. One of photographs and one of writing. The two arts are fundamentally different: the photographer is presented with a world of objects and people; the writer encounters the poverty of an empty page. Through grappling with the mediums of writing and photography as they convey the history of others, I believe that the students will come to a greater understanding of their own history (as heard in their own words and seen through their own eyes) while recognizing that,
in poverty and suffering (and in failure, too) there was virtue. For him [Agee], the poor
were
blessed; they were the ‘famous men’ [and ‘women’] whose children are within the covenant and whose seed shall remain forever.
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It is my hope that the presentation of this unit will challenge and strengthen a student’s skills of seeing and those which communicate that perception. I hope that they will find that Agee’s writing
[R]eveals that he balanced the tension between participating and recording first by writing passages of ‘pure’ perception, as if he were a lens or the sensitive plate of the camera, and then by extricating himself from that imaginative role and dramatizing himself in the act of perceiving and interacting. On the one hand, Agee was the camera itself, registering impressions, making direct and unmediated contact with the world; on the other hand, he was Walker Evans, the holder of the camera, a cameraman who inevitably had to act as a man in relation to others.
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