Photographs by Mississippi icon Eudora Welty capture with pictures the world that the author describes with words. This exhibition places her photographs from the thirties alongside visual artwork by her contemporaries from across the country and in Mississippi. The photographs and paintings which come from this period are visual interpretations, not only of the economic instability and often great personal despair, but of the optimism about the human spirit and of pride of place.
Photography left a profound impression on Welty’s writing, teaching her that “Life doesn’t hold still,” as she explained in One Writer’s Beginnings. “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.”
After completing her education in Wisconsin and New York, the untimely death of her father in 1931 brought her back to Jackson, where she worked for a local radio station and wrote society news for Memphis, Tennessee’s The Commercial Appeal. Then she began to travel as a photojournalist.
As the Great Depression deepened the need to look at and define the country’s character, artists nationwide focused on the activities and patterns of everyday life in America. While some artists chose to critique it, some to glorify it, and others simply to show it, this collective focus was known as the American Scene Movement, which virtually produced a self-portrait of the nation during the trying times of the 1930s.
What Welty reveals in her photography is more than a record of the times; she captures the spirit of ordinary people in their struggle with daily living conditions. Yet, her many photographs of Mississippi during the 1930s are evidence of her optimism about the human spirit and pride in the South. They illuminate the same qualities that attract readers to her fiction; compassion, depth of observation, sly humor, and a quiet, profound gaze. In the early years Welty worked with a camera, she captured many aspects of the human condition with her lens before she began to refocus her keen eye to her pen and fiction. In 1936, Welty published her first important short story, launching a successful writing career that spanned over six decades.
Welty’s formal career as a photographer never really materialized, even though two exhibitions of her photographs were mounted in New York and have been published in several books. Yet, while she felt her primary medium was language, she continued to use a camera until 1950 when she left her Rolleiflex on a Paris Metro bench, and out of anger at her own carelessness, did not replace it.
Her photographs bear witness to America’s courage in the face of adversity, Few American writers share both a gift for pictorial precision and words as does Welty: the craft of metaphor, the gift for discovering the world and then transmitting the image clearly. Now that so many of her photographs are available, readers have a new and retroactive companion for a fresh approach to her fiction. She is an ultimate passionate observer of her time.

Eudora Welty and Walter Anderson

This exhibition is one of several that have placed Walter Anderson in the context of his time. Although he and Welty were not acquainted personally, they shared many friends in the Jackson area, especially the artist Marie Hull, and during the Depression years they both portrayed many faces of people of the time. While teachers at the Pennsylvania Academy predicted that Anderson would be a portrait painter, and the many portraits during the thirties give credence to that idea, Welty, on the other hand, made many portraits using her camera, but used the eye of an artist in knowing when to snap the shutter.
They both worked for New Deal programs of the thirties designed to help those struggling to make a living. Anderson’s large PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) murals for the high school and proposals for other commissions stand beside Welty’s FSA (Farm Security Administration) documentary photographs of the time. Anderson’s murals are marked by a sense of history and an objective removal from the subject, while Welty’s landscapes are more poignant. But both share a compassionate identity with the individuals in their portraits. And both Welty and Anderson loved words and used them to explore and describe although their paths diverged into different media.
It is interesting, furthermore, that both artists are known for their attention to place. Mississippi is indeed lucky to have such a wealth of stories and paintings that capture the uniqueness of the people and the place — those traits, patterns of speech, views of the world and the light, the lush beauty, and strangeness— that makes the area at once different, and the same, as the rest of our world. Both Welty and Anderson, as passionate observers of time and place, are skilled in bringing their insights back to the rest of us.

-- P.P.