In the middle of the Great Depression, Fortune magazine commissioned Evans and staff writer James Agee to produce a feature on the plight of tenant farmers in the American South. The two New Yorkers spent several weeks documenting the harsh routine of three families who grew cotton on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. The unpublished article eventually became one of the era's literary masterpieces, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). A journey to the limits of direct observation, the book presents in words and pictures "a portion of unimagined [human] existence," as Agee wrote in the preface.

This portrait of father and daughter, barefoot and at ease, is a superb example of the dignity and austere beauty Evans discovered in the lives of ordinary citizens during his half-century photographic career. With seeming transparency and characteristic graphic equipoise, Evans composed an image as much about individual family traditions as about broader agrarian issues. Strong and long-limbed like her father, Lucille Burroughs at age ten could pick 150 pounds of cotton a day. She also inherited a less useful legacy: her parents' lifelong debt to a landlord who owned their cabin, farm, tools, mules, and the product of all their labor.