James Agee

Images have invaded nearly every section of our daily lives, from newspapers and magazines to advertisements we see all around. The form that these images take usually is the photograph, accompanied by written (or spoken) words of some sort –
and thus actually forming an interaction of text and images. The culmination of this interaction is the so-called “photographic essay”, a series of photographs depicting a specified topic accompanied by text, usually published in a magazine, in a book or on the internet. To understand the potential of both image and word, a close reading of the seminal photo-essay Let Us Pray Famous Menby Walker Evans and James Agee shows that words can be devoid of the logos, the “logic”, argumentative potential of
language, whereas images on the other hand can be arranged to make sense in a logical way. Let Us Now Praise Famous Menis read as criticism of the photographic essay as it is used in magazines, a criticism that nonetheless shows why and how
the interaction of images with the written word transforms realexperiences into experiences of reality, how it makes information happen.

In 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans started a documentary reportage on white tenant farming in Alabama on assignment for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. The 30,000-word article that was ultimately sent to Fortune—“Cotton Tenants. Three Families”—was rejected by the editors. Agee decided to expand his report into what would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 400-page “anti-documentary” book that was to shatter all the journalistic and literary conventions of the genre. Only in 2013, James Agee’s manuscript of the original 1936 piece rejected by Fortune was published by Melville House, thus offering a valuable insight into the evolution of Agee’s documentary aesthetics and, more generally, the short trajectory of the photo-essay book. This essay will therefore try to consider how Agee’s position vis-à-vis journalistic liberal corporatism and documentary New Dealism changes in the five years separating the two texts, particularly in relation to the bourgeois bias underlying the voyeuristic nature of the genre; how these changes affect the narrative modes devised to render the voices of the tenants by adjusting or disrupting the mold of the participant-observer method; and, finally, what implications do these changes have in terms of social inclusiveness of the subjects represented.

Attraverso il confronto fra Let Us Now Praise Famous Men di James Agee e Walker Evans e Poor People di William T. Vollmann, l'articolo si propone di mostrare come quest'ultimo rifletta e cerchi di risolvere i problemi etici, politici e formali della rappresentazione documentaria. In particolare, si analizzano le modalità attraverso le quali viene problematizzato il processo di mediazione e di fruizione e lo specifico della retorica adottata da Vollmann per rendere conto dell'esperienza di un'alterità subalterna