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Empathy and Engagement: The Subjective Documentary

Mark Durden

James Agee is here describing how Walker Evans takes a portrait of one of the tenant farmer families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans allows his subjects the dignity of determining how they would like to be pictured. His portraits are generally celebrated for this ethical dimension, a negotiation between photographer and subject which differs from much of the other Depression photography, which instead tended to reduce the poor to a spectacle of alterity: wretched, alien, defeated and pitiable. Evans’ subjects address the camera, face on, upstanding, composed and commanding respect. more...