James Agee had an intense regard for the camera. In his thirties, he became one of the most talented film critics of his generation; but even in 1936, on assignment with Walker Evans in Alabama, he was acutely aware of working in tandem with an artist whose ability to record history seriously threatened or qualified his own efforts. "Next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness," he said, "[the camera is] the central instrument of our time."

Agee devoted a significant part of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to explaining this sentiment, beginning the text with an anecdote about helping Walker Evans take pictures when they first arrived in the South and ending with a critique of Margaret Bourke-White's rival photography book, You Have Seen Their Faces. Most of the sorting out that goes on in these pages is personal—Agee's reflections about photography occur in the context of his own wide-ranging anxieties about journalism—but as he discussed Evans and Bourke-White, he placed two modes of investigative photography before his readers and asked them to consider the moral and political issues behind the camera's privileged access to poverty. "It seems to me curious," Agee wrote, "not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to ... an organ of journalism to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings ... for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science." Both Bourke-White and Evans had established their early careers "in the name of science," and both of them had turned their lenses on the poverty of the rural South, but beyond these superficial likenesses, Agee could see clear and far-reaching differences in their approaches to photography. Just as Evans stood as an exemplar of all that Agee hoped to achieve, Bourke-White represented all that he hated about investigative reporting and the New York art world.