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영어

Images have invaded nearly every section of our daily lives, from newspapers and magazines to advertisements we see all around. The form that these images take usually is the photograph, accompanied by written (or spoken) words of some sort – and thus actually forming an interaction of text and images. The culmination of this interaction is the so-called “photographic essay”, a series of photographs depicting a specified topic accompanied by text, usually published in a magazine, in a book or on the internet. To understand the potential of both image and word, a close reading of the seminal photo-essay Let Us Pray Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee shows that words can be devoid of the logos, the “logic”, argumentative potential of language, whereas images on the other hand can be arranged to make sense in a logical way. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is read as criticism of the photographic essay as it is used in magazines, a criticism that nonetheless shows why and how the interaction of images with the written word transforms real experiences into experiences of reality, how it makes information happen.