ISBN: 082031692X 9780820316925

Category: Photography / Photojournalism

Page count: 64

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in <i>You Have Seen Their Faces</i>, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's <i>How the Other Half Lives</i>, and James Agee and Walker Evans's <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</i>, which it preceded by more than three years. <p>Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.</p>