YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES
Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White
Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White: YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES. NYC: Modern Age Books, 1937. First paperback issue, after the Viking Press Cloth edition published the same year. A very good to near-fine softcover book in photographically-printed wrappers in a nearly fine dust jacket: an exceptionally well-preserved copy of a fragile volume. Gift inscription on half-title page, otherwise interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print and rare in dust jacket. 8.25 x 11.25 softcover book with 75 photogravures from Bourke-White. Originally published in 1937 as a impassioned plea against poverty and racism, an important political tract of WPA era photojournalism that ranks with James Agee & Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Text by Erskine Caldwell and Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White of the Sharecroppers living in the Southern United States (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee) at the time of the great depression. These are some of Miss Bourke-White's finest and most memorable photo-portraits -- presenting "man, and the intention of his soul." If you have not seen these faces, "there is much that you have yet to learn about America."
"This 'word-and-picture portrait of the share-cropping South' told the truth in both text and image about a reality hidden to most Americans at the time" (Roth, 94). As one of Life magazine's first photojournalists, Margaret Bourke-White "helped create and define the look of picture magazines in the United States." During the Dust Bowl, her skillful wedding of two seemingly incompatible styles, a "hard-edged theatrical style partaking of the machine-age esthetic [and a] no-nonsense style indebted to the Farm Security Administration's photography project. [She brought] into high relief the disparity between industrial society and those displaced by it" (New York Times). "The most commercially successful of American documentary photobooks and one of the most controversial," the highly influential You Have Seen Their Faces was a collaboration with Bourke-White's future husband, writer Erskine Caldwell (Parr & Badger I:122, 140).
out of stock