DeCarava's photos and Hughes's story, told through the character Sister Mary Bradley, depict and describe Black family life in Harlem, New York City, in the 1950s.

To match them, Hughes writes Bradley's monologue in Black Vernacular and has her begin with a description of her large family and their lives in Harlem.

DeCarava captures children playing in the spray of a fire hydrant; Hughes describes Rodney as the first to open them each summer.

The images show portraits of Harlemites engaged in their occupations as Bradley expresses pride in the variety of work done by her family and race.

Visited by her janitor, Bradley contemplates a new romance with him and insists that she will keep on living: "I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life—and I'll be dogged if I want to get loose.

"[1] In 1952, DeCarava became the first Black photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he spent the next year taking a series of photos of daily life in Harlem.

Multiple publishing houses rejected the proposal, including Doubleday, despite its editor-in-chief describing DeCarava as "a Rembrandt of the camera".

[12][13] The Times reviewer praised the union of photography and text and wrote that "chances are it could accomplish a lot more about race relations than many pounds of committee reports."

[2] That year critic Sean O'Hagan described the book as "a pioneering exercise in merging image and text as well as a revealing glimpse into the everyday lives of Harlem's black community.

[16][3] In 1993 Thadious M. Davis compared the book to Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a collaboration between the author Richard Wright and the photographer Edwin Rosskam.

[5] Peter Galassi felt that Hughes's words "mask[ed] the eloquence of photographs so complete in themselves that they require no elucidation", noting that some of DeCarava's best images saw their power "dilute[d]" in order to fit with the text.