Allison Carpenter

One thing I noticed when looking at Walker Evan’s photographs from his “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” was how desolate the pictures looked. He really captured the emotion and distress of the people that lived through the depression. The emotion that he captured really struck me, I felt like I was really part of the time and feeling what those people went through. It gives people an eye to the emotion and distress of the emotion that is hard to capture in any other medium other than photography. The use of black and white helped capture the desolate nature of the times. The people in the pictures look very grungy and desolate, which is the way of the times. He didn’t do anything to try to perfect the people, but he wanted to capture them just as they were. Just as they live every day. Much of photography is trying to perfect people’s look and trying to perfect the way they appear to other in society. The people in Walker Evan’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” were suffering through the depression which is a far from perfect. He captured the imperfection that they faced. Many of the people were dirty, and far from societies image of perfect and those are the things that were stuck out to me when I first looked at the picture, even the grunginess of the places that they lived. They were make shift shacks and Walker Evans made sure he captured these things. I can imagine the response of the people who looked at the images who experienced the depression was of shock. Many probably did not know the extent to the living conditions of these people, and Walker Evans was able to capture these accurately to give the public a good image of the depression and what fellow American’s called reality.