The Cruel Radiance of What Is
“For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned … with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.” So writes James Agee on what could be seen as photography’s greatest aim and one of its important contributions to our common life. He wrote these words in his Introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his mutual project with photographer Walker Evans. The text and photographs—in Agee’s words, “coequal, mutually independent, and fully ...
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