Boualja Mohamed Mohamed من عند Vasyuchyn, Ivano-Frankivs'ka oblast, أوكرانيا من عند Vasyuchyn, Ivano-Frankivs'ka oblast, أوكرانيا

James Agee and photographer Walker Evans teamed up in the 1930s to portray tenant families as painfully honestly as possible. With Agee's knack for vivid description and Evans' talent of capturing ones humanity in haunting quality, this book (shelved as Sociology) takes three tenant families in Alabama in the middle of the Great Depression and describes their lifestyle, their work and their environment in brutal honesty. While all components were solid - Agee's narrative, Evans' art - as a collective unit there was a lot missing for me. Originally meant to be a documentary on the lives of tenant farmers for Fortune magazine, the information was introduced as individual units. While rejected by the magazine in the late 30s, publishers picked it up by the early 40s and put it all into one volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Some pieces are diary entries, some are detailed descriptions regarding the homes of each of the three families, written in painstaking (and I mean painstaking) detail. I especially enjoyed Agee's Death in the Family and I can appreciate Evans' photography, but somehow the two did not mesh as well in this volume as one would have imagined. It was hard to keep my interest - the bits I enjoyed the most were the interactions between Agee and the families; unfortunately, this was not the majority of the book.