This essay examines the cultural prominence of documentary photography during the 1930s, and reads Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” as in part an index to the critical tension between written word and photographic image theorized by Rukeyser and others during the period. “The Book of the Dead,” a work in which photography and photographers figure prominently, takes a self-critical approach to the documentary practices informing it, challenging the hegemony of the photographic image and the cultural conditions under which it assumed its rhetorical potency.