It could be argued that in a written documentary, the images and information that the author chooses to include are purposeful. Unlike with a camera, the only aspects of the people and the surroundings that are being portrayed are what the author meant to portray. Events that occur during the documenter’s process with a camera, can be edited, but one never knows what images slip past this editing process and make it into the documentary. This is not the case with written works. In Walker and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the July sections begins with the “chapter” “Late Sunday Morning.” Walker and Agee meet a man who wants to take them out to the country to meet his tenants, and the man, whose name Agee cannot remember, informs them
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Prior to this, when the unnamed land owner in “Late Sunday Morning” had the black tenants sing for Agee and Evans, Agee notes that “during all this singing, [he] had been sick in the knowledge that they felt they were at our demand, mine and Walker’s, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in perversion of self-torture, I played my part through” (28). Both of these scenes are implicitly uncomfortable for Agee and Walker and the African Americans that they encounter. In each instance, Agee depicts them as invading their spaces and disrupting their lives. While he has similar concerns with the white families he encounters, he is able to overcome these issues to finish the documentary and impose himself into the stories both as a spectator and, at times, an active participant. It could be argued that Agee is aware that in black spaces, he would not be able to overcome the discomfort and feeling of being an invader in those spaces. However, it could also be argued that Agee understands the underlying reasons for those racial lines and subversively critiques them in the section “Colon” when he discusses people who are not quite like other people and how if a child had been born “otherwise, he would break his shell upon other forms of madness: he might…have sprung up in the sheltering and soft shame and guilt of money” among other types of issues that he describes as
Prior to this, when the unnamed land owner in “Late Sunday Morning” had the black tenants sing for Agee and Evans, Agee notes that “during all this singing, [he] had been sick in the knowledge that they felt they were at our demand, mine and Walker’s, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in perversion of self-torture, I played my part through” (28). Both of these scenes are implicitly uncomfortable for Agee and Walker and the African Americans that they encounter. In each instance, Agee depicts them as invading their spaces and disrupting their lives. While he has similar concerns with the white families he encounters, he is able to overcome these issues to finish the documentary and impose himself into the stories both as a spectator and, at times, an active participant. It could be argued that Agee is aware that in black spaces, he would not be able to overcome the discomfort and feeling of being an invader in those spaces. However, it could also be argued that Agee understands the underlying reasons for those racial lines and subversively critiques them in the section “Colon” when he discusses people who are not quite like other people and how if a child had been born “otherwise, he would break his shell upon other forms of madness: he might…have sprung up in the sheltering and soft shame and guilt of money” among other types of issues that he describes as