You Have Seen Their Faces was published by Viking Press in 1937, and it was the most commercially successful of the Depression-era documentary photo-text books — a collaboration between Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White that made visible to middle-class America the poverty, degradation, and resilience of the rural South.
Caldwell and Bourke-White traveled through the South in the summer of 1936, visiting sharecropper cabins, tenant farms, churches, jails, and chain gangs. Bourke-White’s photographs — stark, compassionate, technically brilliant — showed faces marked by hunger, exhaustion, and endurance: children with pellagra, women worn old by thirty, men sitting in the ruins of failed farms. Caldwell’s text provided context: the economics of sharecropping, the destruction of the soil, the racial caste system, the failure of government relief.
The book was controversial on multiple fronts. Caldwell and Bourke-White invented captions for the photographs — putting words in the mouths of their subjects rather than quoting them directly — a practice that James Agee and Walker Evans, working on their own Southern documentary (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941), found ethically repugnant. The methodological debate between the two projects — Caldwell’s populist accessibility versus Agee’s scrupulous conscience — became a defining argument in the history of documentary culture.
Collecting You Have Seen Their Faces
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1937): Quarto format, cloth with photographic dust jacket. The photographs are the primary attraction for collectors.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $40–$100
- Later editions and reprints: $15–$40