Photographs

By Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price and Natasha Trethewey

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496823922

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty is author of many novels and story collections, including The Optimist’s Daughter (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, as well as three collections of her photographic work—Photographs, Country Churchyards, and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT WAS

By Natasha Trethewey

I was given my first copy of Eudora Welty’s Photographs in 1990, not long after the book’s initial publication. Back then I was in my first year of graduate school, having committed myself to becoming a writer. Of course, I had found my way to Welty before that – through her stories and her illuminating meditation on the origins of her work in One Writer’s Beginnings. As a native Mississippian, I was drawn to this remarkable woman as much for the clarity and vision and truth of her fiction as for the history we shared – rooted in place – the fate of our geography. Place, she wrote, – geography and climate – shapes characters…. It furnishes the economic background [a writer] grows up in, and the folkways and the stories that come down to him in his family. It is the fountainhead of [her] knowledge and experience. Looking at her photographs, I found the documentary evidence: the truth not only of her imagination but also of her experience, her deep observation, a record of what she had seen.

This was transformative for me. Already, I had begun writing notes in my journal for poems about my maternal grandmother, a black woman born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1916, who’d come of age in the 1930s. As long as I can remember I had been listening to the stories about her life, her journeys, the work she’d done to survive, the work she loved, her faith and endless striving. I listened trying to see the palimpsest of her world overlaid on my own, the Mississippi I’d entered in 1966, fifty years after her, on the heels of major advancements in the civil rights movement – the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and ’65. Though things were changing, the remnants of the Jim Crow world my grandmother had grown up in, the world Welty had photographed, were everywhere around us. Poverty in Mississippi, white and black, Welty said, really didn’t have too much to do with the Depression. It was ongoing. Mississippi was long since poor, long devastated. I took the pictures of our poverty because that was reality, and I was recording it.

Photographs of the place where I was growing up would have shown many of the same material conditions as in Welty’s photographs of black Mississippians in the 1930s. My North Gulfport was impoverished and still partially rural, but it was also a place of resilience and joy. I woke most mornings to the crowing of a rooster, hymns in my grandmother’s resonant alto, her laughter as she chatted in the yard with Uncle Mun – a man, deaf from birth, who spoke only in percussive syllables, choked and guttural. Beneath our house, an expanded shotgun propped two feet off the ground on cinderblocks, I could hear pigs rooting in the dirt. There were chickens and hogs, often loosed and roaming; a skinny cow behind a fence in our neighbor’s yard; fig, pecan, and persimmon trees; a church across the street where I learned recitations for the various pageants put on throughout the year; shotgun shacks and unpaved roads. My own experience of the place had provided a glimpse into what had become a rapidly vanishing past, but the Mississippi I was trying to document – to see, my grandmother’s – was far in the distance, blurred and impressionistic. A young writer, I was like a nearsighted watchman, absent my corrective lenses, straining the limits of my vision.

Though in my mind’s eye I could imagine the nearly vanished world from my grandmother’s stories, I had not been there, had not seen: the street scenes, the candid expressions and subtle interactions, the intimacies and ordinariness, the details on a dress or apron (my grandmother had proudly described floral-print clothing sewn from cotton cornmeal sacks). Nor had I realized, amidst the constant barrage of cultural images diminishing or rendering monolithic a people – my people, southern, black, of a particular time and place – that there was evidence of another way of seeing: a vision rooted in an unvarnished attempt to show reality. Eudora Welty’s photographs provided that other way of seeing, the visual, historical evidence: a record, she has said. The life in those times.

That record was the lens I needed.

One of Welty’s photographs from Jackson in the 1930s shows a young woman in a street scene, poised on a curb as if about to step off and cross the street. She seems on the verge of something, paused in her forward motion as if to present herself as a woman with places to go. Her hair is perfectly waved beneath her proper hat, and she stands as if she were posing for a fashion drawing – the envelope of a Vogue or Butterick pattern – to display a smart day coat. There is a clutch bag under her arm, her elbow crooked so that her hand, clad in a black leather glove, rests lightly in her coat pocket – a picture of elegant nonchalance, though the look on her face suggests something else. What? Wariness? Awareness – of self or otherwise? It’s hard to know, but Welty captures the ambiguity, the woman’s inner complexity. When I first saw the photograph, I couldn’t help but think the woman seemed powerfully in charge – an equal participant in the reality that the photograph captures. In it, I see a manifestation of my young grandmother, the decades-younger version of the person I’d come to know – a well-dressed woman who’d made all of her own clothes, and then my mother’s, with the patterns she bought in downtown Gulfport or New Orleans.

The grandmother I grew up with – older, the wisdom of her age etched lightly on her smooth face – might have been the woman in Welty’s photograph of Ida M’Toy. Standing on her porch, the woman raises her chin, the hint of an enigmatic smile teasing the corners of her mouth. When Welty photographed her, the former midwife was self-employed, operating a secondhand clothing store in her home. All my life, my grandmother had been self-employed, too, making draperies in the front workroom of her house, and she displayed that same quiet pride I see on the face of Ida M’Toy. Everywhere we went she kept her chin tilted up, a gesture I’d come to understand as the posture of dignity in spite of and resistance to a lifetime of Jim Crow. Welty captures that dynamic, as