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Books > Arts & Architecture > Photography & photographs > Photographic collections > Photographic reportage
In the summer of 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker
Evans, on assignment
for "Fortune" magazine, went to central Alabama to document the
lives of three white
sharecropper families. Agee's editors killed the article, and
after a torturous five-year
struggle to do artistic justice to the material, the author
finally published it in book form
as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," only to see it sink with barely
a ripple. The posthumous
revival of Agee's literary fortunes led to the work's reissue in
1960, its adoption as an unofficial
bible by civil rights workers, and its enshrinement as an American
classic. It has
remained in print ever since.
In this, the third volume in The Works of James Agee series,
editor Hugh Davis not
only offers a thoroughly annotated edition of the Agee-Evans
masterpiece, featuring invaluable
explanatory notes as well as notes comparing the published work to
extant copies of the
original manuscript, but also supplements that text with a wealth
of additional material: an
insightful critical essay, variant versions of key sections,
unused chapters, correspondence
between Agee and others involved in the book's publication
(notably Houghton Mifflin editor
Robert Linscott), generous selections from the author's notebooks,
and much more. This
volume opens with the original gallery of Evans's thirty-one
photographs from the 1941
edition and also includes, as part of the supplementary material,
the expanded gallery of
sixty-two photos that appeared in the 1960 edition. Here as well
is the text of the rejected
"Fortune" article, "Cotton Tenants," fully annotated for the first
time.
Informed by Agee's love of his subjects, his acute observational
skills, and his poetic,
passionate, raging voice--not to mention the stark artistry of
Evan's black and white photography
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is a book that to this day defies
easy classification.
This volume recaptures the aesthetic impact of the original,
corrects errors from earlier
editions, and, most important, illuminates the difficult process
that spawned its creation.
Yo Soy Fidel follows the cortege of Fidel Castro, former Cuban
revolutionary and politician, over a period of several days in late
2016. Michael Christopher Brown leaned out a rear passenger window
of his passing vehicle in order to photograph Cubans waiting
alongside the highway for Fidel's military convoy, carrying his
cremated remains from Havana to Santiago, to pass. The route
mirrored Fidel's post-revolution journey from Santiago to Havana in
1959, which helped solidify his hero and legend. In Yo Soy Fidel ,
fragments of this initial image have survived his death though
perhaps inevitably lead to a question of what is to come. A country
largely seen for half a century as a symbol of dignity and hope in
the fight against imperialism, Cuba has a choice - stay true to
Fidel's revolutionary path or succumb to globalization and all it
entails.
A work that combines the force of poetry and sensitive and
captivating photography in defense of the dignity of the children
from the third world. Una obra que combina la fuerza de la poesia y
la imagen en defensa de la dignidad de los ninos del mal llamado
tercer mundo.
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