For me, Agee’s writing introduced another layer of depth and humanity to Walker’s subjects. When I first saw the pictures, I was not quite sure what to think. As Kat noted, it felt like their unsmiling, stony visages added to the piece a sense of stasis that was hard to shake. However, Agee’s writing helped to dissolve the feeling that all of this was happening in a vacuum. His writing takes the moments of these subjects’ lives and zooms in on them greatly, treating them as individual families instead of a small part of this massive system of disparity and disenfranchisement.

His writing also felt considerate in a way that Walker’s photography just didn’t. When Agee details his feelings regarding the African American couple and the way that he had expected Walker to act toward them, I found myself considering the way that the men’s respective crafts played out in their respective behaviors. Walker’s unbridled willingness to insert himself into situations without thought for all of his subjects’ many aspects felt rather characteristic to photography. The thought pattern that I’m gathering from him feels like it suffers from the same narrowness of consideration as his camera lens. The camera captures still moments, but it only really captures the surface. From the pictures that are presented in the beginning of this work, I know little about the subjects’ true selves, only that they are poorer and have [seemingly] been dealt a less-than-lovely hand in life.

Agee, however, both in the moment with the African American couple and in his writing, seems to focus so much on the depth of the subjects. He pays greater attention to who they are and what they’ve experienced rather than what consumers can glean from outer appearance. However, I did appreciate that Agee also considered the ways in which his craft is inconsiderate of its subjects. He picks apart his subjects’ lives though words and, although he is able to capture a more comprehensive picture of them (no pun intended), he is forced to interact with them in a way that can leave a greater impact than the snapshots that Walker provides. His craft is prying in a way that is hard to ignore.