Disappearing in Plain Sight: James Agee, Walker Evans and the Urban Commonplace

Authors

  • Adriana Haben Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Abstract

This paper attempts to provide a transdisciplinary outlook on the questions of common spaces and the commonplace, through the works of a photographer, Walker Evans, and a writer, James Agee. In 1939, these two artists worked on separate documentary projects depicting different aspects of New York City: Evans’s portraits, captured in the subway using a concealed camera, are published in the photobook Many Are Called, while Agee’s essay about Brooklyn, adapted from a rejected Fortune magazine manuscript, was later turned into a book entitled Brooklyn Is. Better known for their collaboration on the documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the writer and the photographer aim at recentering the documentary genre and the viewer’s gaze not on the extraordinary or the newsworthy, but on the commonplace and the ordinary, redefining the limits of the visible and the invisible in the process. Their emphasis on the everyday steers the documentary genre away from its original aims of social reform and help redefine it as a genre that concerns itself with acknowledging what deserves to be visible. 

Author Biography

Adriana Haben, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Adriana Haben is currently working on a PhD thesis at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, entitled “‘Unimagined Existence’: pour un documentaire de la disparition dans les oeuvres de James Agee et Walker Evans,” under the supervision of Nathalie Cochoy (University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès) and Jean Kempf (Lyon 2 University). Her research focuses on the works of James Agee and Walker Evans, more specifically on the redefinition of the documentary genre through the focus on the everyday and the ordinary, as well as on the interactions between the photographic medium and the literary text.

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Published

2021-01-15

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2020): Lieux communs 1

Section

ARTICLES

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