You Have Seen Their Faces is a book by photographer Margaret Bourke-White and novelist Erskine Caldwell. It was first published in 1937 by Viking Press, with a paperback version by Modern Age Books following quickly. Bourke-White and Caldwell married in 1939.[1]
For this pictorial survey about rural American South and its troubles, Bronx-born Bourke-White took the pictures, while Georgia-born Caldwell wrote the text. Together, they both wrote captions:
Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash, and wrote with pleasure of having them "imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened." The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person captions.[2]
This book inspired James Agee to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).[3]
The book's title is reminiscent of two short stories by Whittaker Chambers in The New Masses: "Can You Make Out Their Voices" (March 1931)[4] and "You Have Seen the Heads" (April 1931). The former story Hallie Flanagan (later director of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project) made into a popular play under the title "Can You Hear Their Voices?"