October 5, 2007
The Coleman Center for the Arts is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Photographs by Walker Evans from Hale County. The show will be on display from Friday October 5th to November 4th, and the opening reception and annual membership party will take place this Friday, October 5th from 6-8 PM in the Coleman Center gallery. Food for the reception will be provided by the Trackside Blues Café in York. The event is free and open to the public, and all are encouraged to attend.
Walker Evans’ well-known depression era photographs of three tenant families in Alabama’s Hale County, originally presented in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with accompanying text by the American writer James Agee, have become some of the most well known documentary photographs in the history of photography. In the summer of 1936 Evans and Agee were hired by the US Government as part of the Farm Security Administration photography project that grew out of FDR’s “New Deal.” The pair lived with three tenant families for the majority of the summer, documenting their work and lives. The book, which has become an American classic, was not published until 1941. Since that time it has become famous for Evans’ straight-forward documentary photographs and Agee’s romantic and detailed text.
The prints in this exhibition were printed in conjunction with the Coleman Center’s workshop, Working With Digital Files. Using high-resolution files available for download from the Library of Congress website, the class used historical images to teach contemporary digital printing standards. The final exhibition taps into the rich history of photography present in Alabama’s Black Belt Region and presents what Agee called, “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”
This exhibition was made possible by funding from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alabama Power Foundation, as well as the generous contributions of our individual supporters. For more information please contact the Coleman Center for the Arts at 205-392-2005, email info@colemanarts.org, or visit www.colemanarts.org.