ABSTRACT
With an emphasis on the importance of historical archives and records, this second chapter introduces the first of a number of case studies that I shall discuss as examples of lamination: James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936), perhaps the best-known study of the Great Depression in 1930s America. The chapter will discuss the role of texts and photographs in representing factual and historical events in this collaboration between writer (Agee) and photographer (Evans), which is chosen because of its exemplary and experimental nature. Inversion is a crucial theme in this book as Agee endeavours to produce a kind of photographic realism in his “hypergraphic” writing and as Evans tries to produce a “discourse of images” with his “documentary style” photography. These stylistic features have significance for the concept of lamination. The chapter therefore offers two readings of the book. The first reading offers an exposition of the theme of inversion involving text and photograph and what this means from a sociological or ethnographic perspective. The second reading, on the other hand, will discuss the experimentation according to the concept of lamination, as textual description merges closely with photographic depiction.
