You Have Seen Their Faces. Text by Erskine Caldwell. Photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1940 (originally published by Viking in 1937 with a softbound reprint by Modern Age the same year). 54 pp. Large quarto. Clothbound in photo-illustrated dust jacket. Gravure reproductions.
Scarce 1940 hardbound re-issue of this absolutely engrossing depression-era book with images taken in numerous rural areas throughout Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina. A 'primary source' for FSA documentary work, here seen in a uniquely contemporary context, this is a fascinating document of the sharecropping rural south at the tail-end of the Depression. As Parr and Badger explain in The Photobook,A History, Vol. I, You Have Seen Their Faces was the both the most financially successful documentary photobook of the Depression era and the most controversial. "This is a partisan book, and makes no attempt to be anything else, with both text and imagery at least a notch higher on the emotional scale than An American Exodus by Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor.
Near Fine+ in Very Good dust jacket; wear to backstrip at foot of spine; jacket edge worn; 1" chip with adjacent tear to front panel; minor chipping at other corners with no major loss; spine moderately faded. |
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