Allison Carpenter

On November 12 2010 Baldwin Lee, who is one of the last people to be an assistant to Walker Evans came to lecture about the show “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. One this that Baldwin Lee mentioned in his lecture on “Let us Now Praise Famous Men,” by Walker Evans was that Walker Evans and his partner spent 6 weeks in the south before they began their project. They spent 6 weeks living with three families that were sharecroppers during the Great Depression. I thought this was an interesting because as Baldwin Lee said during his lecture, this level of access was extra ordinary for any artist. I believe that this is the reason for how Walker Lee was able to capture the emotion and true personality of the people of the time. The access that he was given was able to really contribute to the success of the “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” I can imagine the time that Walker Lee and his partner spent with these families was an extremely special time for these two. The time they spent getting to know the families and the people that lived through and suffered the most through the depression probably gave them an awesome perspective into the entire population of poor stricken people of the depression era. Even though the show wasn’t able to see immediate success, the emotion that Walker Evan’s was able to capture is what helped the generations to come understand what happened during this time. Walker Evans was able to capture the essence of the depression, and the part that was most devastating to look at, the people who really suffered. Some of these images were so striking that I found them sometimes difficult to look at. It was hard to image that people of that generation really had to suffer that much.