James Agee would have us honor the lives of working men and women like those pictured in this portfolio from Russell Lee's 1946 photographs for the Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947). And so we should. Yet it is neither an easy gesture nor one we can enact out of the brief and casual glance most of us give such photographs. We are continually surfeited with images of other people's lives in America. Most of these images are calculated to create the illusion that we know the lives of the people portrayed while, in fact, we know very little about them. Surface appearance retails as substantial acquaintance. The images commonly produced by television, newspapers, and magazines not only invite us to pretend knowledge we lack; they also project an essentially prosperous image of America—if everyone cannot have all he wants, still everyone possesses all he needs. Lee's photographs of miners and their families, their homes and their work, their worship and their play are uncommon images. Like all photographs they catch only a moment in a person's existence. Nonetheless, Lee made a range of images that move beyond the moment to a portrait of the round of life among mining people. The faces, the moments, even the landscape, are past, and the way of life unfamiliar. For these reasons we may look quickly and then away for we do not know what to make of what we see.