“POOR PEOPLE GET PASSED BY”: MODERN AGE EDITION OF YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES, 1937, WITH 75 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

BOURKE-WHITE, Margaret and CALDWELL, Erskine. You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: Modern Age Books, (1937). Quarto, original photographic stiff paper covers, original matching dust jacket. $175.

Scarce soft-bound Modern Age edition (published the same year as the cloth-bound first) of this pioneering classic, the record of a “reality hidden to most Americans,” with 75 deep photogravures of the Dust Bowl by Bourke-White and text by novelist Erskine Caldwell. From the collection of award-winning photojournlalist Peter Turnley.

“This ‘word-and-picture portrait of the share-cropping South’ told the truth in both text and image about a reality hidden to most Americans at the time” (Roth, 94). As one of Life magazine’s first photojournalists, Margaret Bourke-White “helped create and define the look of picture magazines in the United States.” During the Dust Bowl, her skillful wedding of two seemingly incompatible styles, a “hard-edged theatrical style partaking of the machine-age esthetic… [and a] no-nonsense style indebted to the Farm Security Administration’s photography project. [She brought] into high relief the disparity between industrial society and those displaced by it” (New York Times). “The most commercially successful of American documentary photobooks… and one of the most controversial,” the highly influential You Have Seen Their Faces was a collaboration with Bourke-White’s future husband, writer Erskine Caldwell (Parr & Badger I:122, 140). See Open Book, 124. From the collection of acclaimed photojournalist Peter Turnley, who has covered “almost every important international news event of the last 15 years” (New York Times). Owner signature.

Interior and images fine. Minor chipping to spine ends of original paper cover, moderate edge-wear to dust jacket. An extremely good copy. Scarce.