It was there where in the summer of 1936 James Agee and Walker Evans met the three tenant farmers, they portrayed for the project that later became famous under the title of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The area is to some extent photohistorically well-known terrain. Initially the book follows the topics of Walker Evans’ photographs and shows the small town of Greensboro, the landscape, the agriculture, the people and their homes. The repertoire is broadened by architec-tures of the Rural Studio, an architecture program of Auburn University. Additionally the project deals with the historic facts of slavery, cotton, and the Civil Rights Movement which Lockemann considers necessary to understand today’s situation in the area. In a postscript the project is linked to the issue of the dismantling of monuments – considered racist today – which causes a lot of contro-versy in the South.The pictures are accompa-nied by short notes and stories that supply context information and give an account of Lockemann’s personal approach to locations and people.

Bettina Lockemann, *1971 in Berlin, Germany; lives and works in Berlin.

Winner of the German Photo Book Prize 2021/22 in bronze
in the category “Conceptual-artistic photo book