Eudora Welty as Photographer

Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction

  • By T.A. Frail
  • Smithsonian magazine, April 2009, Subscribe
View More Photos »
Home by Dark by Eudora Welty
After a year in graduate school in New York City, Eudora Welty returned to her native Mississippi and began taking pictures (Home by Dark). (Copyright Eudora Welty, LLC; Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History)

Photo Gallery (1/6)

Eudora Welty

Explore more photos from the story


Video Gallery

The Photography of Eudora Welty

The Photography of Eudora Welty

Related Links

Related Books

One Writer’s Beginnings

by Eudora Welty
Harvard University Press, 1984

Eudora Welty: A Biography

by Suzanne Marrs
Harcourt Inc., 2005

Eudora Welty as Photographer

by Pearl Amelia McHaney (editor)
University Press of Mississippi, 2009

One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album

by Eudora Welty
Random House, 1971

Eudora Welty Photographs

by Reynolds Price (forward)
University Press of Mississippi, 1989


Eudora Welty was one of the grandest grande dames of American letters—winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, an armful of O. Henry Awards and the Medal of Freedom, to name just a few. But before she published a single one of her many short stories, she had a one-woman show of her photographs.

The pictures, made in Mississippi in the early to mid-1930s, show the rural poor and convey the want and worry of the Great Depression. But more than that, they show the photographer's wide-ranging curiosity and unstinting empathy—which would mark her work as a writer, too. Appropriately, another exhibition of Welty's photographs, which opened last fall at the Museum of the City of New York and travels to Jackson, Mississippi, this month, inaugurated a yearlong celebration of the writer's birth, April 13, 1909.

"While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. "I came from a stable, sheltered, relatively happy home that by the time of the Depression and the early death of my father (which happened to us in the same year) had become comfortably enough off by small-town Southern standards."

Her father died of leukemia in 1931, at age 52. And while the comfort of the Welty home did not entirely unravel—as an insurance executive in Jackson, Christian Welty had known about anticipating calamities—Eudora was already moving beyond the confines of her family environment.

She had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business for a year at Columbia University. (Her parents, who entertained her stated ambition of becoming a writer, insisted that she pursue the proverbial something to fall back on.) She returned to Jackson after her father's diagnosis, and after he died, she remained there with her mother, writing short stories and casting about for work.

For the next five years, Welty took a series of part-time jobs, producing a newsletter at a local radio station; writing for the Jackson State Tribune; sending society notes to the Memphis Commercial Appeal; and taking pictures for the Jackson Junior Auxiliary. She had used a camera since adolescence—her father, an avid snapshot man, helped establish Jackson's first camera store—but now she began taking photography more seriously, especially as she traveled outside Jackson. In 1934, she applied to study at the New School for Social Research in New York City with photographer Berenice Abbott, who was documenting landmarks disappearing in the city's rush toward modernity. Welty's application was turned down.

It hardly mattered. Through the early '30s, Welty gathered a body of work remarkable for the photographer's choice of subjects and her ability to put them—or keep them—at ease. That is especially noteworthy given that many of her subjects were African-Americans. "While white people in a Deep South state like Mississippi were surrounded by blacks at the time...they were socially invisible," the television journalist and author Robert MacNeil, a longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview during a recent symposium on her work at the Museum of the City of New York. "In a way, these two decades before the civil rights movement began, these photographs of black people give us insight into a personality who saw the humanity of these people before we began officially to recognize them."

Welty, for her part, would acknowledge that she moved "through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted," but laid claim only to a personal agenda. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said in a 1989 interview. "I was the recorder of it. I wasn't trying to exhort the public"—in contrast, she noted, to Walker Evans and other American documentary photographers of the '30s. (When a collection of her pictures was published as One Time, One Place in 1971, she wrote: "This book is offered, I should explain, not as a social document but as a family album—which is something both less and more, but unadorned.")

In early 1936, Welty took one of her occasional trips to New York City. This time she brought some photographs in the hope of selling them. In a decision biographer Suzanne Marrs describes as spontaneous, Welty dropped in at the Photographic Galleries run by Lugene Opticians Inc.—and was given a two-week show. (That show has been recreated for the centennial exhibit and supplemented with pictures she made in New York.)

That March, however, Welty received word that a small magazine called Manuscript would publish two short stories she had submitted. "I didn't care a hoot that they couldn't, they didn't pay me anything," she would recall. "If they had paid me a million dollars it wouldn't have made any difference. I wanted acceptance and publication."

That acceptance foretold the end of her photographic career. Welty used her camera for several years more but invested her creative energies in her writing. "I always tried to get her to start over again, you know, when I got to know her in the mid-1950s," the novelist Reynolds Price, another longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview. "But she'd finished. She said, I've done what I have to do. I've said what I had to say."

In her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, published in 1984, Welty paid respects to picture-taking by noting: "I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it."

She added: "These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived."

That was long indeed. Welty died on July 23, 2001, at the age of 92. 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.

T. A. Frail is a senior editor of the magazine.


Eudora Welty was one of the grandest grande dames of American letters—winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, an armful of O. Henry Awards and the Medal of Freedom, to name just a few. But before she published a single one of her many short stories, she had a one-woman show of her photographs.

The pictures, made in Mississippi in the early to mid-1930s, show the rural poor and convey the want and worry of the Great Depression. But more than that, they show the photographer's wide-ranging curiosity and unstinting empathy—which would mark her work as a writer, too. Appropriately, another exhibition of Welty's photographs, which opened last fall at the Museum of the City of New York and travels to Jackson, Mississippi, this month, inaugurated a yearlong celebration of the writer's birth, April 13, 1909.

"While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. "I came from a stable, sheltered, relatively happy home that by the time of the Depression and the early death of my father (which happened to us in the same year) had become comfortably enough off by small-town Southern standards."

Her father died of leukemia in 1931, at age 52. And while the comfort of the Welty home did not entirely unravel—as an insurance executive in Jackson, Christian Welty had known about anticipating calamities—Eudora was already moving beyond the confines of her family environment.

She had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business for a year at Columbia University. (Her parents, who entertained her stated ambition of becoming a writer, insisted that she pursue the proverbial something to fall back on.) She returned to Jackson after her father's diagnosis, and after he died, she remained there with her mother, writing short stories and casting about for work.

For the next five years, Welty took a series of part-time jobs, producing a newsletter at a local radio station; writing for the Jackson State Tribune; sending society notes to the Memphis Commercial Appeal; and taking pictures for the Jackson Junior Auxiliary. She had used a camera since adolescence—her father, an avid snapshot man, helped establish Jackson's first camera store—but now she began taking photography more seriously, especially as she traveled outside Jackson. In 1934, she applied to study at the New School for Social Research in New York City with photographer Berenice Abbott, who was documenting landmarks disappearing in the city's rush toward modernity. Welty's application was turned down.

It hardly mattered. Through the early '30s, Welty gathered a body of work remarkable for the photographer's choice of subjects and her ability to put them—or keep them—at ease. That is especially noteworthy given that many of her subjects were African-Americans. "While white people in a Deep South state like Mississippi were surrounded by blacks at the time...they were socially invisible," the television journalist and author Robert MacNeil, a longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview during a recent symposium on her work at the Museum of the City of New York. "In a way, these two decades before the civil rights movement began, these photographs of black people give us insight into a personality who saw the humanity of these people before we began officially to recognize them."

Welty, for her part, would acknowledge that she moved "through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted," but laid claim only to a personal agenda. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said in a 1989 interview. "I was the recorder of it. I wasn't trying to exhort the public"—in contrast, she noted, to Walker Evans and other American documentary photographers of the '30s. (When a collection of her pictures was published as One Time, One Place in 1971, she wrote: "This book is offered, I should explain, not as a social document but as a family album—which is something both less and more, but unadorned.")

In early 1936, Welty took one of her occasional trips to New York City. This time she brought some photographs in the hope of selling them. In a decision biographer Suzanne Marrs describes as spontaneous, Welty dropped in at the Photographic Galleries run by Lugene Opticians Inc.—and was given a two-week show. (That show has been recreated for the centennial exhibit and supplemented with pictures she made in New York.)

That March, however, Welty received word that a small magazine called Manuscript would publish two short stories she had submitted. "I didn't care a hoot that they couldn't, they didn't pay me anything," she would recall. "If they had paid me a million dollars it wouldn't have made any difference. I wanted acceptance and publication."

That acceptance foretold the end of her photographic career. Welty used her camera for several years more but invested her creative energies in her writing. "I always tried to get her to start over again, you know, when I got to know her in the mid-1950s," the novelist Reynolds Price, another longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview. "But she'd finished. She said, I've done what I have to do. I've said what I had to say."

In her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, published in 1984, Welty paid respects to picture-taking by noting: "I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it."

She added: "These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived."

That was long indeed. Welty died on July 23, 2001, at the age of 92. 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.

T. A. Frail is a senior editor of the magazine.

    Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.



 

Add New Comment


Name: (required)

Email: (required)

Comment:

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until Smithsonian.com has approved them. Smithsonian reserves the right not to post any comments that are unlawful, threatening, offensive, defamatory, invasive of a person's privacy, inappropriate, confidential or proprietary, political messages, product endorsements, or other content that might otherwise violate any laws or policies.

Comments (80)

+ View All Comments

T.A. Frail:

Thanks for a most enjoyable article about one of my favorite writers. Actually, I am also trying to reach you directly as my friend former NY Times economics reporter Leslie Wayne recommended you.

I am a former Boston Globe arts reporter turned biographer, currently writing the biography of renowned American female violinmaker Carleen Hutchins. See: www.quincywhitney.com. The Hutchins Consort of San Diego, CA, will be making its Debut East Coast Tour in October, 2011. www.hutchinsconsort.org.

Do you know who plans concerts at the Smithsonian? At the Library of Congress? Or how I can find this information? I would be deeply grateful. Best regards, Quincy

Posted by D.Quincy Whitney on January 7,2011 | 10:03 AM

Wonderfully well-written article that adds fuel to the fire for discussions about the artistic depth of writers who “paint” pictures with words. This provides me with great material for conversations with photojournalists who demur they cannot write – from artists, who not only write well, but tell stories so well with pictures. I especially appreciated the history-context for Ms. Welty by Mr. Frail – and the wonderful use of quotes by Ms. Welty to provide additional insight... Thank you.

Posted by Kevin E. Dayhoff on November 2,2010 | 03:18 AM

What an interesting post; I loved the video of her photographs. If you are interested in Eudora Welty's life why not visit her web site? It shows her home that she lived all of her life and also the lovely gardens that she adored.


http://www.eudorawelty.org/

Posted by Jennifer Dee on July 12,2010 | 04:37 AM

The video is great! Can anyone tell me the name of the photo of the black lady in the hat in the video at 2:29? Her eyes cut right through me and make me cry! I'm writing a poem about it, but need the name! Thank you!

Posted by Phyllis on April 15,2010 | 07:50 PM

I own number 43 of 90 of "Twelve Photographs", signed by Welty in 1980 and released by Palaemon Press Limited. The entire collection was contact-printed from the original negatives by Gil and Gib Ford of Jackson, MS.

Can anyone direct me to a reliable source to gain knowledge of the value of this collection?

I'd appreciate it. She is one of my greatest heroes.

Thanks.

Posted by Amy on October 1,2009 | 05:00 PM

this is sooo cuutee.

Posted by on September 29,2009 | 04:08 PM

i love this work

Posted by Gabrielle on September 29,2009 | 10:14 AM

I like her story.She inspires me to become a better person :D

Posted by Angel Thonpson on September 29,2009 | 10:13 AM

i love her artwork it is very inspring

Posted by Raven on September 29,2009 | 10:12 AM

SHE WAS SURELY THE BEST AUTHOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER OF ALL TIME.HER LEGACY WILL LIVE ON

Posted by Joshua Magee on September 29,2009 | 10:11 AM

I think Eudora Welty was a very impressive photographer as well as writer... basically what I'm saying is that her pictures are AWESOME!!!

Posted by Kristen N. on September 29,2009 | 10:10 AM

I think that she was the best photographer of her time. I enjoy her work very much. This time of her life,I think, prepared her for her writing career.

Posted by Ike N. on September 29,2009 | 10:09 AM

She was surely the best author if all time. She will be missed, but her legacy will live on.

Posted by on September 29,2009 | 10:09 AM

Eudora Welty has some of the most spectacular photograps I have ever seen. R.I.P.

Posted by Jesse Love on September 29,2009 | 10:06 AM



Advertisement


Advertisement

Follow Us





First Name
Last Name
Address 1
Address 2
City
State   Zip
Email


Travel with Smithsonian




Smithsonian Store