You Have Seen Their Faces

1st p/b edition (publ. Modern Age Press)

Viking Press published the book You Have Seen Their Faces (OCLC 1548861) in 1937, by noted photographer Margaret Bourke White and novelist Erskine Caldwell, then husband and wife. Immediately thereafter a paperback version was published by Modern Age Books.

Contents

For this pictorial survey about rural American South and its troubles, Bronx-born Bourke-White took the pictures, while Georgia-born Caldwell wrote the text. Together, they both wrote captions:

Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash, and wrote with pleasure of having them “imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.” The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person captions.

This book predates Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee and Walker Evans.

Title

(The book's title is reminiscent of two short stories by Whittaker Chambers in The New Masses: "You Can Make Out Their Voices" (March 1931) and "You Have Seen the Heads" (April 1931). The former story Hallie Flanagan (later director of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project) made into a popular play under the title "Can You Hear Their Voices?"

See also

• Margaret Bourke White
• Erskine Caldwell
• Whittaker Chambers
• Bibliography for Whittaker Chambers
• Hallie Flanagan

External links

• Library of Congress
• Google Books
• Encyclopædia Britannica
• Art Icono - photos by Margaret Bourke-White
• University of Virginia - photos by Margaret Bourke-White
• Monroe Gallery - photo by Margaret Bourke-White
• New Yorker - "It Happened One Decade" (September 21, 2009)