"A good snapshot stops a moment
from running away."

Pulitzer Prize winning author Eudora Welty started her career as a photographer who made images of Depression-era America for President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, the agency formed to provide work for poor folks in this time. Her heart-wrenching depictions of small-town Mississippi brought her international acclaim, as Welty sensitively captured the pride she saw among even the poorest people. She published pictures of Mississippians washing laundry by hand, tending a bootleg still and slaughtering hogs.

image from olemiss.edu

"It was before self-consciousness had come into the relationship or suspicion. That's why the experience couldn't be repeated today, anywhere."

Welty once said that her quest in photography, as in fiction, was “not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.”

Born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909, Eudora Welty was influenced by her father's love of the camera from an early age. She remained a "visual minded person" and employed this skill in her writing. Welty once called herself "a natural observer."

image from olemiss.edu

"To me the details tell everything. One detail can tell more than any descriptive passage in general, you know. That's the way my eye sees, so I just use it."

Welty attended Mississippi University for Women, later graduating from the University of Wisconsin and doing postgraduate work at Columbia University in New York. After college she lived almost all her life in the home her father built in the 1920s.

"I think perhaps a kindred impulse made me attempt two unrelated things - an inquiring nature and a wish to respond to what I saw and to what I felt about things, by something I produced or did."

Welty quit taking pictures after leaving her Rolleiflex camera on a subway bench in Paris. "I punished myself. I didn't deserve a camera after that. I was so crushed, and by then cameras were much more expensive and of course now they are out of sight."

Her photographs were exhibited in New York in l936 and l937 and at the Museum of Modern Art in l973. Several of books of her photography have been published including One Time, One Place, a book of 100 black-and-white photographs published in 1971, focused exclusively on Welty's Depression-era pictures. A 1989 book, Eudora Welty Photographs, features more than 200 pictures, some taken on her travels around the world.

She never married and dedicated her life to her work. Welty died of pneumonia this summer, July 23, 2001, at the age of 92. I read that her doctor had to post a sign on her door turning away fans seeking autographs. Welty added a handwritten apology, but it was reportedly taken as a souvenir.

portraits courtesy Mississippi Department
of Archives and History

If you are a fan of Welty's, check out the Eudora Welty Newsletter established by William McDonald in 1977 at the University of Toledo. The newsletter and website is "tool of scholarship, information, and homage to one of America's most beloved writers (and photographers), Eudora Welty." The site has evolved to include bibliographic references to her works, textual analyses, news and queries about Eudora Welty and her works, and checklists of scholarship.

She is currently featured in the exhibit Faces and Stories: Photographs by Curt Richter at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The show presents black-and-white portraits of Southern authors and runs from November 10, 2001 – January 13, 2002.

And in case you were wondering, the popular Eudora e-mail program is named after her, inspired by her short story "Why I Live at the P.O."

Check out an interview with Welty on The New York Times online taken from the in intro to her book "Photographs."