SOURCE: “The Moment of ‘Three Women Eating’: Completing the Story of You Have Seen Their Faces,” in Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, Vol. 29, 1994, pp. 61-74.

In the following essay, McDonald discusses the significance of the photograph “Three Women Eating” to the collection of photographs in You Have Seen Their Faces.

In 1936 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White merged their respective talents to produce one of the great documents of Depression-era America, the photo-text study You Have Seen Their Faces. There have been several accounts of the circumstances under which Caldwell and Bourke-White agreed to collaborate on this project, including their own autobiographical recollections.¹ Missing from each of these accounts, however, is any mention of an early goodwill gesture from Bourke-White that must have finally convinced a dubious Caldwell that he had indeed found a partner capable of understanding what he wanted this new book to be, and a photographer...