{"id":51,"date":"2025-12-06T02:21:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T02:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/?p=51"},"modified":"2025-12-06T02:21:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T02:21:30","slug":"who-are-we-supposed-to-praise-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/?p=51","title":{"rendered":"Who Are We Supposed to Praise Again?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Something from our class that has stayed with me throughout the semester and will continue to influence me beyond the class is the initial reading we did: the excerpts inside the first Coles reading that quoted and discussed <em>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men <\/em>by James Agee. The self-hatred and guilt expressed by Agee simply for the act of doing documentary work was something I had never before considered. Of course documentary ethics were not entirely foreign to me, I understood that in journalism and documentation there was a certain level of self-scrutiny required to report on marginalized communities. But even with care, creating documentary work in the best interest of marginalized communities can often deal more damage than good. The descriptions Agee gave bled scorn, for himself, his audience, and the people who sent him to make the documentary in the first place, yet not those who propped up the institution of sharecropping in the first place. Perhaps Agee found this out of his control, and doing- or not doing- documentary work to be the one thing he could impact. Surprisingly, he found it damaging on a visceral level, almost predatory, in a way that has opened my eyes to the moral dilemmas that anybody who chooses to create art or document must face to have any sort of credibility in their work. As somebody with an interest in documentary-adjacent fields like journalism, especially as an active writer for the Muhlenberg Weekly, I found myself startled by Agee\u2019s perspective and also intrigued to a level that has stuck with me ever since that second class in a way that will almost certainly carry over to my own work.\u00a0<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"757\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image-757x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-52\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image-757x1024.png 757w, https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image-222x300.png 222w, https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image-768x1039.png 768w, https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/image.png 860w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 757px) 100vw, 757px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Photo by <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/@nypl?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">The New York Public Library<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/TozHpFdnRtw?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Unsplash<\/a>. Free to use under the\u00a0Unsplash License.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/TozHpFdnRtw\">https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/TozHpFdnRtw<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something from our class that has stayed with me throughout the semester and will continue to influence me beyond the class is the initial reading we did: the excerpts inside the first Coles reading that quoted and discussed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. The self-hatred and guilt expressed by Agee simply [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gdiem.bergbuilds.domains\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}