Floyd Burroughs, patriarch of one of the sharecropper families photographed by Walker Evans in the summer of 1936, is the subject of one of 76 vintage photographs by the famed documentarian in the exhibition "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg. Click photo for larger image.

In the summer of 1936, while the country was struggling with the uncertainty of the Great Depression, two young New Yorkers took a journey into the Deep South that would change their lives and influence American social policy.

The men were photographer Walker Evans, then 33, and writer James Agee, 27, and they were on assignment for Fortune magazine to document the conditions of white Southern sharecroppers. When Fortune decided not to run their project, a version became the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," published in 1941 by Houghton Mifflin. The book became a classic of American literature, and several of Evans' images became American icons.

An exhibition of the same title at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, displays 76 of Evans' vintage photographs, some archival material including notes written in Agee's minuscule hand, and a first edition of the book.

It is Evans' moving imagery that tells the story here, the prints' diminutive size drawing the viewer near. While generalized regional images are included, of a store or a school, for example, it is the stark representation of three families in particular, and their homes, that illuminate the burden of rural poverty. They're spaced as regularly as heartbeats throughout the gallery, a rhythm that underscores the humanity stripped bare, an issue that Agee expressed concern over early in the project, and that successive generations of some families have taken issue with.

Commentary is not necessary to perceive the character -- or lack thereof, in the instance of the incestuous Frank Tengle -- of members of these families, barefooted against the Alabama heat and frequently wearing tattered clothing permeated with the dust that slaked off the thinly weeded packed earth surrounding their wooden plank houses.

Farmer Bud Fields with his wife and daughter in their bedroom, taken in 1936 in Hale County, Ala., by Walker Evans. The photographer and writer James Agee were on assignment for Fortune magazine to document the conditions of white Southern sharecroppers in the heart of the Great Depression. Click photo for larger image.

So, too, the scarcity of material goods is evident. (Nor are such conditions historical artifact. A nun viewing the exhibition when I was there noted to a companion that the people she serves locally have kitchens similar to those Evans depicted 70 years ago.)

If the images speak for themselves, wall texts supply additional information to give a sense of the conditions of the period and place that one is staring into. But for full appreciation, one would also want to read Agee's meltingly seductive words in the book, which the exhibition visitor will only sample.

Not that it's an easy read. In one place the detail is minute and specific; in another the words soar poetically. And all of it flows in page-sized paragraphs broken by impossible numbers of colons, making it simultaneously urgent and matter-of-fact.

Consider the only two photographs shown of the families picking cotton. (Evans is said to have not generally photographed them laboring because that would be a subjective personalization of their trials, while Agee could remain descriptively generic. However, the text does admit that Evans rearranged rooms to suit his compositional -- and editorial? -- needs.)

In one, patriarch Bud Fields stands in a field and faces the camera looking robust and crisp. In the other, 10-year-old Lucille Burroughs seems to effortlessly move down the rows of plants.

But let Agee's text flesh out the scenes:

"The family exists for work. It exists to keep itself alive. It is a cooperative economic unit. ... A family is called a force, without irony; and children come into the world chiefly that they may help with the work and that through their help the family may increase itself" (Page 284).

More broad-reaching are the implications of post-slavery economic and social injustices that continued to be practiced by the cotton industry. Burroughs, for example, turned over half of his production to his landlord. Fields, who owned his own implements and mule, paid out lesser percentages of his crops. All were indebted, in much the same manner as Western Pennsylvania immigrant coal miners, to stores owned by the same landlord for seed and food advances made while waiting for the crops to come in.

The exhibition was curated by Ulrich Keller of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibition, Los Angeles.

Keller has done minimal reordering of the sequencing of the photographs, which Evans carefully controlled for publication; added several; and made useful commentary that frames them within contemporary theoretical concerns. Still, one might disagree with some of his conclusions.

The last two images in the exhibition -- and in the 1960 edition of the book that Evans selected additional photographs for -- are of "A Child's Grave," its gracefully sloped mound of earth simple and elegant, and, finally, of "A Gourd Tree for Martins" an ubiquitous Southern garden object comprising a number of hollowed gourds with cut-out entry holes that are hung in groups from poles to house the birds.

Rather than thinking of them as a "hilarious collection" by which Evans makes "toying comment on the transitoriness of life on earth," one might better see them as a poignant evocation of the transcendence of the human spirit that surmounts fatigue and depravation to create buoyant forms, born of the soil and honed by hand for the pure purpose of attracting birds.

That is profound. As are these lives we hesitatingly trespass.

"Famous Men" continues through July 17 at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Suggested donation: $3, children under 12 free; 724-837-1500 or visit www.wmuseumaa.org.