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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Language
- Agee, in an essay on Helen Levitt's collection of photographs of Spanish Harlem, explains the purpose of the photographer: "to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world, and to make an undisturbed and faithful record of the instant in which this movement of creativeness achieves its most expressive crystallization"
- Agee wanted language to be an exact record of actuality, but recognized that words "are the most inevitably inaccurate of all mediums of record and communication" (236)
- Agee: "Words cannot embody: they can only describe" (238)
- Agee: "It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to and can make them tell of a thing which happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing" (246).
- Agee: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement" (13). For one artist's approach to this idea, see Robert Rauschenberg: http://search.famsf.org/4d.acgi$Search?list&=1&=robert&=And&=Yes&=rauschenberg&=&=&=Yes&=Yes&=f
- Alfred T. Barson: "To record the 'dignity of actuality,' then, depended not only on recording what was seen, but also on representing the process by which it had been seen, by which it had been recalled, and by which it was reported" (95).
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