Photographs
Photographs
Eudora Welty’s Photographs, originally published in 1989, serves as the definitive book of the critically acclaimed writer’s photographs. Her camera’s viewfinder captured deep compassion and her artist’s sensibilities. Photographs is a deeply felt documentation of 1930s Mississippi taken by a keenly observant photographer who showed the human side of her subjects. Also included in the book are pictures from Welty’s travels to New York, New Orleans, South Carolina, Mexico, and Europe in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.
The photographs in this edition are new digital scans of Welty’s original negatives and authentic prints, restoring the images to their original glory. It also features sixteen additional images, several of which were selected by Welty for her 1936 photography exhibit in New York City and have never before been reproduced for publication, along with a resonant, new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey.
Thirty years after its publication, this defining monograph of the writer’s photography has been revivified, thanks to digital scans of Welty’s work. A new foreword by Natasha Trethewey joins Reynolds Price’s original.
Reynolds Price, who wrote the foreword, detects in her short stories and novels the same ‘instant indelible force’ that we hope to find in a photograph—and do, in Ms. Welty’s. . . . Above all, Ms. Welty stresses the importance of the subjects of her photographs.
Welcome both as the definitive collection of Welty’s pictures and as an important part of her career: the foundation upon which the great edifice was built.
Welty’s portraits uncovered dignity and even joy in these hard years.
Her literary legacy—not only her stories but her novels, essays, and reviews—traces the full arc of a writer’s imagination. But the pictures bring us back to the time and the place it all began.
Welty captured a way of life in spontaneous scenes as lyrical and atmospheric as her fiction.
We are better too for the soft still moments, the occasional humor, the quiet inarticulateness of many of the faces Eudora Welty has shared with us from her family album; and we remain grateful for her enduring consummate artistic honesty.
This album of her black-and-white shots reveals a sensitivity to place augmented by a keen eye for drama.
Welty’s photographs were, for me, a resource, a way to see a time and place I’d only encountered in history books and my grandmother’s stories. I began writing poems with those images in mind, each one a starting place to anchor visually what I’d heard in the cadences of my grandmother’s voice, how she’d say—reaching the end of a story—That’s just the way it was.
As a teenager in 1971, I first became aware that the great writer Eudora Welty was also a photographer. Her photographs had a profound effect on me. In addition to the actual images, perhaps as significant was Miss Welty’s statement: ‘A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was a part of it, born into it, taken for granted.’ This gave me a framework for my own work. I was honored to have known her much later, and in 1999, to show her my book Delta Land, which was, in large part, an homage to her pioneering work chronicling Mississippi.
Eudora Welty (1909–2001) is the author of many novels and story collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter, Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, and A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, as well as collections of her photographic work Country Churchyards and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, both published by University Press of Mississippi.
