"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is a photographic essay of life in the
             poor rural South during the Great Depression. In it, master photographer
             Walker Evans and writer James Agee form a partnership to chronicle the
             lives of three families: the Gudgers, the Woods, and the Ricketts.
             However, the story is much more than simply the diary of people's daily
             lives. Agee writes, "I believe that every human being is potentially
             capable within his 'limits' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that
             this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest,
             commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world
             can assure itself" (Agee and Evans 307). Therefore, this moving book is
             part chronicle, part social conscious, and part early reality television,
             combined to create a book that changed the way many looked at the poor and
             the hungry during the Depression. Eventually, President Franklin D.
             Roosevelt saw the miscarriages between the poor and the still wealthy in
             the country, and increase the tax burden on the wealthy to help equal out
             While Agee creates a moving essay on the dignity and promise of
             America's poor, the real meat of the book lies in Evans' outstanding and
             moving photography. The photos themselves, 50 of them, use no captions or
             descriptions to tell the viewer what to look for. They simply present the
             families as they are, allowing the viewer to make up their own mind about
             what they are seeing with no explanation. The photos themselves are stark
             black and white, immediately showing the utter poverty these people
             survived in, but also illustrating their strength, their dignity, and their
             Evans uses different camera techniques quite effectively throughout
             the book. Some shots are close-up, showing the weathered lines on faces,
             the sheer exhaustion of the heavy work, and the frank understanding of the
             ...