May 28, 2005

• Saturday Photo

  Elizabeth and Ida Tengle, Hale County Alabama (Summer, 1936)
  Photographer – Walker Evans, 1903-1975

  I will tell you, in all detail, of
  where I am; of what I perceive.
  Everything that is is holy. –James Agee

  Years ago I came upon the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans and was amazed at the concept they had managed. In 1936, they were both young men (Agee 27, Evans 33) when they were sent by Fortune magazine into rural Alabama to document the lives of tenant farmers. FDR had just been elected for a second term and his New Deal was looking at the poverty in the nation’s farming population, resulting in the forming of the Farm Security Administration. Evans and Agee concentrated their attention on three sharecropper families – Agee wrote exquisite prose descriptions of their lives and their environment while Evans recorded them in black and white reality. It would be another five years before it was published, as Fortune magazine backed out. In 1965 Evans left Fortune , where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death. Here are more of his photos from the book and here is a quote from Agee:

  It is late in a summer night, in a room of a house set deep and solitary in the country; all in this house save myself are sleeping; I sit at a table, facing a partition wall; and I am looking at a lighted coal-oil lamp which stands on the table close to the wall, and just beyond the sleeping of my relaxed left hand; with my right hand I am from time to time writing, with a soft pencil, into a school-child’s composition book; but just now, I am entirely focused on the lamp, and light.
  

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  Deep Thought: “Too bad you can’t just grab a tree by the very tip-top and bend it clear over the ground and then let her fly, because I bet you’d be amazed at all the stuff that comes flying out.”
  Today I am grateful for: The palm of my hand
  Guess the Movie: “Hello, this is Mr. Foreman. If you give my daughter an alcoholic beverage or a joint, I will hunt you down and neuter you.” Answer: In Good Company, 2004. Winner: mjh.
  Rice Interrupted by Enactment of Abu Ghraib Abuse
  SAN FRANCISCO – Demonstrators interrupted a speech by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday by recreating an image of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in which a hooded prisoner stood with his arms outstretched attached to electric wires. (Rest of article here.)
  End of Day: 8:30 pm
  + = Heat dropped to the lovely 70′s today.
  - = Feeling tempted to be paranoid.

  • 2:00 pm
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