What's so famous about them?

I'm not sure if I completely missed the point, because I feel like the title threw me off. Firstly, they are not so much praised as they are merely described. They were all regular people, or workers, some of which whom worked at a church. As mentioned in my title, I don't get what's so famous about them? The writing was quite heavy, their descriptions romanticised, maybe their fame got lost in translation then? Also, Men are in the title, but woman are touched upon as well. This piece was very beautiful. I especially appreciated the section on Overalls. I never thought about them as "harnesses on overworked animals". I had an "ohh" moment reading it, it suddenly all seemed to make sense. Morever, it seemed inhumane. This essay has that "indexicality" feature that we talked about in class: "Rickets in his photograph here, wears such overalls..." (pg. 238) The essay seemed to be a conversation than an academic writing. The fact that they go back and forth between the different characters, indicates an informal dialogue maybe. I imagine the two men sitting over a cup of coffee, sifting through a pile of photographs, and remembering the past. Maybe one of them was Mr.Woods or Mr. Rickets? After finishing the text, I went back to the preface, and it all came together. Mr. Agee and Mr.Evans had gone to live with these families, hence their close familial details of everyone. I found the answer to my question: the authors wanted to appreciate these hard working men. They are famous because they built what we have today. The are the men of yesterday, whose children live on to today. Their ways have carried on. Agee explains that the photographs are not illustrative, the book was necessary to compliment it. That is probably because the pictures showed poor men with ragged clothes, living dirty lives. We would maybe look down at them and Agee doesn't want us to be quick to judge and says that pictures are not enough. There is more in a picture than what you see.