You Have Seen Their Faces

by Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White (Photographer), Alan Trachtenberg (Foreword by)

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 You Have Seen Their Faces , a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives , and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , which it preceded by more than three years.

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.

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, History, American History, American, Sociology, Art

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was holding the region up to ridicule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erskine_...

Reviews

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sharecropping system was born of the plantation system, and the new was anything but an improvement over the old. The old produced numerous families of wealth who developed a culture that was questionable. The new concentrated wealth in the hands of a few families who are determined that no culture shall exist. -- Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces (Viking Press, 1937)

The idea for this book originated with Erskine Caldwell, who wanted "to show that the fiction I was writing was authentically based on contemporary life in the South." Needing a photographer to accompany him on a tour of the South to document through words and pictures the lives of southern tenant farmers, his agent suggested Margaret Bourke-White, already famous for her photos that had appeared in Fortune and Life.

During the summer of 1936 and early 1937, the two traveled from South Carolina to Arkansas interviewing and photographing poor white and black tenant farmers and their families.

Historian Alan Trachtenberg writes in the introduction of my copy of the book that when it was first published that it "struck viewers as a new kind of book, one in which pictures appeared on an equal basis with words" and that through Caldwell's prose and Bourke-White's images it can be viewed as "a long-lost moment of artistic protest against economic injustice and suffering" and that "whatever shortcomings new readers may find in the book, its evidence of a passion for justice joined with a passion for artistic communication makes an irresistible claim on our respect." As such, it was very much considered to be radical for its time.

Readers then and now have been confused by Caldwell's fiction. While he claimed to sympathize with the poor sharecroppers and their families, he nevertheless seemed to be poking fun at them in his novels. Readers searching for stories about the suffering of the noble poor during the Great Depression had to look elsewhere. The poor in Caldwell's novels were anything but noble.

So, what was his personal opinion of poor sharecroppers? And who did he really blame for their poverty and their ignorance?

The answer to those questions may not be clear in his novels, but he makes it crystal clear in this book. It was the landowners, he wrote, "who are to be held responsible, and in the end to be called upon to answer for the degeneration of men as well as the rape of the soil in the South."

Conversely, the sharecroppers, the people who shared in the risk, but not the control, "are the wasted human beings whose blood made the cotton leaves green and the blossoms red. To the cost of raising cotton add the value of lives."

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Many of the Bourke-White photos that appear in the book can be viewed at the link below along with some that appeared in Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

https://www.google.com/search?q=you+h...

[GONZA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, astonishing, sad, depressive. One of the best photography book I have ever seen.

Meraviglioso,bellissimo, stupefacente, triste e deprimente. Uno dei mihliori libri fotografici di sempre.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely extraordinary! This is the culmination of a project by writer Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White to travel the South during the depression to document the conditions of its people. The photography of Bourke-White is amazing. She is my favorite photographer and I have a couple of her books on my shelves that feature her incredible photographs including most of those that are in this book. Just as amazing is the writing of Erskine Caldwell. He explains how the South became so impoverished and how racism became even worse during this period. Basically, his explanation is that the soil of the South was extremely thin to begin with and the cotton plantations, because they only grew cotton, slowly diminished the soil over the years until it was unproductive. When it became too unproductive to farm profitably the landowners took their money and moved to the city and then began renting out the land to the workers to farm. The workers still needed the work so they became sharecroppers and paid rent as well as a percentage of their production to the landowner. This proved extremely profitable for the landowner and they began making even more than they were making farming. The landowners also found that the black renters could be bullied much easier than the whites because they had no power or help from law enforcement and so the landowners began getting rid of the white sharecroppers to be replaced by the blacks. This increased the hate and violence toward the black people by the whites.

[Orion · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early years of the Great Depression, the author Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent 18 months in the American Southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee interviewing and photographing tenant farmers, commonly known as sharecroppers. This book, published in 1935 is the result of their work. Caldwell wrote about sharecroppers barely scraping a living from land drained of all fertility, the landlords who kept 10 million Southerners in economic slavery to produce cotton, and the politicians and ministers who supported the system rather than reform it. While he interviewed, Bourke-White sat quietly with camera ready to photograph them. It includes 75 mostly, full-page pictures taken by her that portray the destitute life of the tenant farming families. This is an amazing depiction of Southern poverty in words and pictures that I found very moving in spite of its age.

[paula.]

for uni

[Clayton Brannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short powerful book of photo's with appropriate commentary on the ills of tenant or sharecropping in the United States.

[Davy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"To the cost of raising cotton add the value of human lives."

It's no real surprise that this book has been largely forgotten -- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published around the same time, is rightly considered a classic, maybe even a masterpiece. It deals with much the same subject matter in much the same format. But aside from the superficial similarities, the two books couldn't be more different. In Famous Men, Evans's direct gaze contrasts sharply with Agee's impassioned prose and for the reader, the result is something like being there yourself -- the photographs show you what was there to see, and Agee's text gives voice to the anguish you feel.

In You Have Seen Their Faces, the tables are turned. Caldwell's text is powerful and informative, assured and calm. I believe if he had published it as an unillustrated pamphlet or magazine article, it would be revered as a classic work of social commentary and political activism. Unfortunately, You Have Seen Their Faces was conceived of as a collaboration, and Bourke-White's contribution sinks the whole thing.

There are two problems with the photos in this book. One is the photos themselves. They're not "bad" pictures, but they are grossly miscalculated. They dramatize. They aim to convince you of the horrors of poverty, and in doing so, they come off as manipulative and sometimes even mean-spirited. The photographer admits as much in the afterword: "It might be an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened." The only thing Evans was trying to express was what he saw in front of him. He leaves the response entirely up to you, and the images hit harder as a result. Here, these poor people look like actors on a stage.

The second problem is the captions. Oh, the captions. Nothing dates this work as much as the captions. If the photos were manipulative on their own, the captions -- all of them fabricated ("the legends under the pictures are intended to express the authors' own conceptions," etc.) -- simply double down on that aspect. It is a challenge to read them without rolling your eyes.

Its faults aside, I'm glad the book is still available to us. It provides a striking contrast with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that only serves to elevate the work of Agee and Evans. And it is ultimately a good thing that Caldwell's words live on, as they provide a sterling example of social reportage linked with common-sense advocacy.

[Carrie Dalby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desolate, tragic, haunting--a raw look at life for Southern sharecroppers during the Depression in the 1930s in photographs and words.

[John Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very different (and far more popular) approach to Depression-era tenant farming than Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This is a drier, more direct way of assessing the situation, written in the straightforward prose version of Walker Evan's "documentary style." As such (and like Evans's LUNPFM photographs) its manipulations are far more subtle than any of Agee's writing, because they come across as more straightforward, immediate, and true. Probably the most egregious example is the captions in the book, which are presented as quotes by the subjects but actually, according to the fine print, "do not pretend to reproduce the actual sentiments of these persons."

Still a good book that tries to trace the roots and contemporary face of tenant farming. It's especially good at highlighting racial tension in the South at the time. Bourke-White's little piece on her photographs at the back is the closest we come to a first-person account of the journey she and Caldwell undertook. Should be read skeptically, as any essay should be, not as objective analysis.

[Sarah Turner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gives an interesting Souther perspective on their suffering post-Reconstruction, but the overt racism against blacks taints Caldwell's argument as he makes it seem as though sharecropping unfairly punishes whites. Furthermore the captions really ruin the photography, such as it is, by mocking the suffering of the black subjects. All in all neither the prose nor the photography is worth the anger this book will stir up

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (Viking Press 1937) (330.975) is a scathing manifesto condemning the sharecropping system in the south as nothing more than legalized slavery. The book contains fantastic photos of southerners down on the farm. My rating: 7/10, finished 9/7/11.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The photography and text itself are beautifully done, but the stylized narrations of farmers were poorly paired with the photographs, and ultimately took away from the haunting narrative of the plight of Unites States sharecroppers in this era.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

looked only at the photography. margaret bourke white one of 3 photographers featured at art institute right now.

[Emily]

Tattered, with no covers, but moving and beautiful photos inside are intact. Text by Caldwell contains heart-rending descriptions of life as a sharecropper, and other stories of the rural south.

[John Lingan]

The shorter, arid cousin to "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," only the photos and text are more cohesively aligned. I first explored the Berkeley Springs and Winchester region with a photographer, Matthew Lincoln Yake, which made me consider the differences between photos and prose in terms of storytelling. When I decided to make this project into a book, I knew Matt's photos had to be a part. This deserves to be better known as a touchstone of photographer/writer collaborations, and expanded my idea of what that form could do.