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.