To Be In A Time Of War accomplishes something incredible, which is it reaches in to not exactly the mind and the process of thought, but in to actions accomplished through pure emotional or physical or subconscious drives. It traces the actions, point by point, one goes through, while taking care to note the actions of thought. The character in the poem goes through a tragic internal conflict of dealing with the realities of war and with the reality of their daily life. They notice a burning hatred within, while all to often going outside to notice the beauty of the natural world around them. In this matter-of-fact, dogmatic kind of tone which makes the word “to” start to look funny to the reader, the author manages to make obvious that we all go through certain actions, and somehow the intermix of the typical turns and movements of human life with the burning emotional reactions to the outside world manages to draw my eyes to the fact that we seemingly appoint importance to certain actions over others. However, is it arbitrary?

I found it pretty interesting how Agee composed the photos at the beginning of the book. Before any explanation, it was clear that these were three separate families before Agee told us such. It reminded me of Sabrina in how the pictures move in and out of these families’ lives, usually starting with an establishing shot of their homes.
His writing gives life to these pictures of people who otherwise may have been lost in history. He does this by writing truthfully about their situations and treating them with the respect famous people throughout history have received. The amount of detail he gives juxtaposes the lack of explanation in the pictures. In regards to the question regarding ethics of this kind of documentation, I am kind of torn. On one hand, if it were my life being documented, I may feel a great invasion of privacy if a stranger from the north came to take pictures of me and my family as we struggle. On the other hand, I feel like if it is to be done, Agee did it in the right way. He stayed with the families for an extended period of time and got to live with each of them intimately. He embraced their ways of life in an effort to truthfully capture what these people in “deplorable circumstances” were experiencing. With that being said, he uses fictional names and he recognizes himself as an outsider. In doing this, he shows respect for the sharecroppers as they are more than just subjects to write about, but human beings.

One of my lingering questions after last week’s reading was how we can go about expressing stories of silenced people who are not dead. What right do we have, as outsiders benefitting from the privilege to travel and learn and write, to represent the experiences of people who don’t get to represent their own experiences? This is one reason I chose to write about the divides between the intellectual cosmopolitan elite and blue-collar/rural americans, rather than about mass incarceration. That is, I have personal experience with the former. To me, it seems problematic to represent experiences of marginalized communities rather than seeking to support those communities in speaking for themselves. Agee expressed many of the problems I see with this type of representation as an outsider. He describes the act of 

      “prying intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, to parade the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity” (7)

In a — presumably purposeful — patronizing tone, Agee delineates two separate groups of people. There is this “appallingly damaged group of human beings” being paraded to “another” separate group of people, one that Agee, and we as scholars are part of. He suggests that this display or documenting or storytelling is always in the name of something — “humanity” or “science” or “journalism” — but insinuates that these things are a guise for a more perverse desire of one group to see another’s difference and suffering. I think Agee thus complicates what “truth” means in these images when they come from his own representation as an outsider meant for the gaze of other outsiders. 

Hartman’s photography, especially the single portraits, strike me extremely dignified and noble. It is unusual for the focused lens to be so liberally spent on portraying a single individual that belongs to the “unimagined existence”–it is exactly the unimaged often blend into a crowd or a mob in the frame of the photographer. An air of importance comes being asked, and affording the time to stop, and look into the camera, to be portrayed not just documented.

Agee’s writing, simultaneously, pushes the depth of conception even further. In action and in conversation one cannot be forgetful of people’s stations and circumstances. Agee doesn’t sanitize habits or conditions, but the poetical form itself allows grace. Eulogies are often sung for conquerers and the successful, but to write so carefully and deliberately for what most people write away with numbers and academic jargons force the reader to see the subject in a different light. I

Melanie Walton

Week 5 Reading Post

My first impression of the photographs was that they were uncomfortably invasive. Although photographs can be important in terms of affording a glimpse into subjects, places, etc. that one might not normally get, their inclusion can be complicated. Specifically, the photographer has a job of whether or not to display the subjects as accurately and unbiased as possible. Subjects, however, do not always have a choice when choosing how they are displayed and represented. I guess what bothered me was the missing captions. Where are the names? This seems to invoke a sense of the subjects’ voices being missing also. Instead, they seemed to be grouped together on their circumstances, rather than their own personal stories. Nayun comments on this when she says, “Therefore, the lack of individual markers in the photographs serve to make the members of the tenant family appear as representatives of a certain group of people rather than products of Agee’s imagination.” However, even though the purpose of the book was more documentary, I still think that this is problematic because viewers have complete control of how they interpret the photographs which can be inaccurate and do more harm without any guiding information being included. Being grouped as a people feels like being grouped as a commodity to me.

I still have mixed feelings about the photographs after learning that most of them weren’t included in the published version of the book. Was this better? To not have them seen and therefore not be viewed as invasive? But then, the writing stands alone in telling the story of the subjects. I don’t know if this is better since the portrayal of the subjects is left up to the author. Admittedly, the author does comment on this extensively before even delving into describing the lives of the subjects. However, it is hard to truly believe the author’s declarations about his genuine motives to portray the subjects accurately and maybe not being qualified to do so. He was paid for the book to be published after all. Reflecting on the discussion of Keene and Hartman last week, I think that whenever someone else is trusted to tell someone else’s story, there will always be missing information and perspectives. I wonder how this would differ if the subjects read what was written and had the opportunity to approve it before it was published. This topic made me think of an article that I read for my Psychology of Race, Ethnics, and Social Change class on the dehumanization of poverty. I think that no matter the author’s intentions, his own privilege and biases jump out (such as his discussion of African Americans). Because of this, I think that more needs to be done to include subjects in sharing their voices and the behind-the-scenes of the publishing/recording of their stories. Methodologies have developed to help accomplish this with conducting research in psychology, but there is still work to be done. This extends into literature too.

The Last Times

The last times are anticlimactic
a subtle finish
a slow burning build
unnoticed deep under chest
always comes back for the next one.

Like the last time I saw my favorite boss;
the last time I heard the special inflection of his voice say
“What’s up, kid?”
The last time I left the city.

The last time I wore pink knee pads,
five years old all bundled up
for the last time I fall
hard wood floor.
The last time I rode a scooter.
five months ago
on a bridge in Paris.

The last time I wore a monochromatic outfit.

The last time I called my dad.
The last time I hung up mid sentence.
The last time I felt a rush
suspended in time.

The last time I was left hanging.

Process notes:

I feel like this is not my best poetry. Not that I can really write good poetry, but when I do try it’s always in the heat of a moment. It’s always an attempt to capture a singular feeling I felt in the moment, but this time was more difficult. I was trying to capture something fleeting, kind of in the style of picture captions. Minimal sentences with just enough descriptive detail to reinforce an image, but nothing really visual. I was trying to create this sense of the last time, which we always think is so finite, and yet they happen and re-happen all the time. It feels really complete when it happens, but it always happens again. I think its an attempt to casually look at the bigger picture, to remove oneself from now just enough to acknowledge that the now will come back in another way.

In observing the collaboration between Evans’ photography and Agee’s writing on poor white sharecroppers, I appreciate the space photography leaves for viewers to think on their own rather than be told what to recognize from a writer’s perspective and the elimination of a greater risk for harm in misrepresenting the details written about an individual’s story. However, Agee addresses the short comings in his writing, and I believe that starting a neglected conversation while acknowledging the limitations present is more valuable than simply not having that conversation. In my opinion, this discussion is strengthened in providing its subjects with the agency to have their voices and experiences heard. Agee’s writing allows for this to occur, especially in the powerful form of hearing the subjects’ opinions on these researchers themselves. On the other hand, Evans’ photography seems to remove the ability for its subjects to move out of a place of being othered. As Kat noted, in this way Evans’ photographs appear to present the initial surface-level perception of their subjects, while Agee’s writing works like Keene’s footnotes do to provide more intimate, humanizing understandings of its subjects.  I found Agee’s suggestion that his piece be “read aloud…for variations of tone, pace, shape, and dynamics are here particularly unavailable to the eye alone…with their loss, a good deal of meaning escapes” (xv) particularly intriguing. In considering this alongside the description of the men summoned to sing for Evans and Agee upon their arrival, I wondered – how could a camera lens have captured the variation and complexity in their seldom heard song? (29-30) Agee also utilizes the concept of sound to consider what impactful engagement looks like to him while discussing how one must play a song at the loudest volume and with one’s ear pressed to the speaker because this is “as near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music” (16). This reminded me of Lynn Hunt’s work Torrents of Emotion, which argues that in hearing the experiences of others through writing, readers gain “a new psychology and in the process (lay) the foundations for a new social and political order” (Hunt, 38-39).  By this she seems to say that in reading others’ personal experiences, you can begin to see them as alike to yourself, as having a shared interior, and thus, you can identify with those who you may have once othered. Hunt further emphasizes that this process of identification is necessary for the extended purview of empathy and without empathy, we could not have “opened the path to human rights” (Hunt, 68). Thus, in support of Hunt and Agee, I see his writing, which allows him to denote his limitations, lessen othering, and have the voice of its subjects be heard, to be more productive than Evans’ photography in the realm of furthering their subjects’ human rights.

It was striking how compared to the exhaustive details of Agee’s text, the photographs lacked any kind of explanation or captions. Readers are left with the anonymous photographs before they dive into any text that could confer a specific meaning to them. Leaving the photographs of the white sharecroppers anonymous, along with giving fictional names to the members of the three tenant families Agee and Evans met, might be an attempt to let the people in their piece exist as human beings rather than characters. Although Agee scrutinizes his subjects in meticulous detail, he thoroughly admits that he is an outsider who is let inside the society of these families to observe them. Moreover, the aim of this piece was to “recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense” and the families serve as representatives for North American cotton tenantry. Therefore, the lack of individual markers in the photographs serve to make the members of the tenant family appear as representatives of a certain group of people rather than products of Agee’s imagination.

The attempt to illustrate the subject as an observer rather than a narrator contrasts with the approach of Keene and Hartman. Both Keene and Hartman utilized critical fabulation to voice the unheard. Keene and Hartman used imagination to shed light to what would be an asterisk in the large book of history, and as they are imagining a part of history that could not be verified, they leave parts of the narrative out for the reader to speculate. In contrast, Agee and Evans had the advantage of visiting their subjects in person in order to examine what life is like for them. However, since their subjects are not beings conceived by them, they focus on illustration rather than endowing meaning, and speculate instead of speaking for their subjects.