Getty Museum
For Walker Evans and James Agee, Knoxville, Tennessee
Creator
Danny LyonAmerican Photographer · 1942–present
All works by this person →> Photographers traditionally have worked in silence, putting everything into the picture, that small area, measured in inches, that they have staked out. I have never done that, but have usually presented my photographs in a book with text. In the texts I have spoken through other people's voices, sometimes out of respect for what they had to say, and sometimes as a disguise for myself. > >--Dann
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- negative 1967; print 1989
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
For Walker Evans and James Agee, two gallant men, together in life, now united immortal in death. Now they are both gone and we are left thoroughly alone. One would have thought that the world itself would end with this single man's [Evans's] death, so great was his vision, so powerful his art. The exalting inscription around the border of this image by Danny Lyon pays homage to the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee. This photograph of two brooding boys was taken while Lyon was on a trip to visit the boyhood home of Agee. In the foreground, one boy clings to a puppy, giving him a look of innocence, while behind him another boy sits in the driver's seat of a convertible. Civil rights activists like Lyon valued the work of Evans and Agee for the sensitive way in which it represented the harsh life of poor and disenfranchised people. Evans is particularly known for the numerous poignant images that he made documenting the effects of the Depression in the American South. In 1941, Evans and Agee collaborated on the book *Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,* which depicted the daily lives of three tenant farmer families in rural Alabama.
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