Reading

About two weeks ago I started re-reading James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  I had forgotten how incredible Agee's use of our language is.  His words bring what he is describing to life, he has a way of making the reader feel just as important as what they are reading.  Not only is the text from this book incredible, but the images are outstanding as well.  Walker Evans was hired to take photographs of what Agee was writing about.  It is one of the few books where the images and the text do not distract from each other, but instead are crucial to the development of one another.

For those of you whom have never read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men here is a synopses.  It's set in the summer of 1936 in a small town in Alabama.  Agee and Evan's were hired by Fortune magazine to document the life of three sharecropper families.  This was during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, when our country was facing incredibly hard times, as we are now.  Agee and Evan's did so much more then just document what they saw.  They created a mastered piece of work, a timeless artistic achievement.  They did not exploit and they found a way to achieve every nuance that they saw and felt through there work.  It's truly an amazing book and really worth a read whatever your interests in life may be.  Above are some of Walker Evan's images from the publishing.