http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/14472535

You have seen their faces

"Margaret Bourke-White made You Have Seen Their Faces with her future husband, the writer Erskine Caldwell. It was the most financially successful of the documentary photobooks published in America during the Depression, and one of the most controversial. ... There were, however, philosophical objections to You Have Seen Their Faces from a purely factual, documentary point of view, and these hinged on the whole style of the book, the rhetoric of both text and photographs. ... Caldwell's text has been much criticized for the fact that he puts words that weren't actually there into the mouths of Bourke-White's subjects, but, as most documentary books of the 1930s demonstrate, 'truth' is a construct, and this is not the only book guilty of that crime--if indeed it is a crime. You Have Seen Their Faces illustrates how the fine lines that govern art of documentary photography--lines relating to rhetoric, emphasis, determinism, prejudgement, objectivity and subjectivity--are distorted at the artist's peril."--The Photobook : A History Volume I / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004.

Open All Close All