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