This paper is an ecocritical investigation of James Agee's response to straight photography as the form is represented in the work of Walker Evans, in 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'. In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans, who was on loan from the Federal government at the time, were hired by Fortune magazine to produce an essay and photographs documenting North American cotton sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the rural south. The work was never completed as such.

The journalism assignment became instead an unwieldy, unclassifiable literary work that took five years to find a publisher, and another two decades, after being reissued in 1960, to begin to receive critical attention. In recent decades, critics have commented appreciably on the text's identity as a central document in documentary expression, a form of social realism that dominates art and literature in the United States in the thirties. What is missing from their commentaries and what this paper seeks to add theretofore is an analysis of the ecological unconscious in the verbal text of 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'. I approach this subject of inquiry by way of Agee's ekphrastic allusions to and ekphrastic rebukes of straight photography. These references not only constitute his critique of a practice of representation that postures as the real; they evidence that Agee uses the straight photograph as a metonym for a green world savagely culled, stripped, and etiolated by human interests. When he attacks the privileged status of the straight photographic representation he concomitantly attacks a political order that aggressively promotes the production of cash crops, which profit a small group of human individuals at the expense of other human communities and non-human communities.

Iris Ralph is currently completing her dissertation in the English graduate program at The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, U.S.A. She is of Greek-Australian and American descent. Following completion of her dissertation she plans to return to Australia and continue a career in teaching, as well as seek further opportunity to practice and teach ecocriticism, and actively promote disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of literature and the environment at both the secondary and tertiary levels of education. The subject of her dissertation is an ecocritical investigation of three American writers, William Carlos Williams, James Agee, and Stephen Crane. She approaches this investigation by way of these writers' responses to or absorption of particular visual artists or visual art movements: Agee and the movement of straight photography; Crane and 19th-century Impressionist painting; and, Williams and the movements of cubism, precisionism, and dada, and the landscapes of the High Renaissance Northern European painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.