Digital Snapshots

The renowned fiction writer Eudora Welty was also a photographer who in her lifetime published several photo books: One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, A Snapshot Album (1971), In Black and White (1985), the inclusive volume Photographs (1989, reissued with posthumous additions in 2019), and the focused collection Country Churchyards (2000). In addition, Patti Carr Black curated and published three photographic exhibition catalogs: Welty (1977), Eudora (1984), and Eudora Welty: Other Places (1995) in conjunction with showings at the Mississippi State Historical Museum; Carr Black, an art historian and author, played a significant role in curating exhibits and creating catalogs of Eudora Welty's photographs for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.[i] Two further photo books have been published since the writer's death, Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009, ed. Pearl A. McHaney) and Eudora Welty et la Photographie (2012, ed. Géraldine Chouard).[ii]

But until 2023, the majority of Welty’s more than 1,000 photographs were only available to be seen as contact prints of negatives in the Eudora Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). Now, with the help of an NEH Grant aided by curatorial, administrative, and technical support from MDAH and a matching contribution from the Eudora Welty Foundation, these images have been preserved and released in digital form.

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Eudora Welty made photographs for more than twenty years, most intensely in the 1930s, exposing prints in her family home on Pinehurst Street in Jackson, as her father had before her.

Explaining her early interest in photography, Welty described memories of her parents developing and printing photographs in the kitchen, and of her later discovery of her father’s negatives and his several cameras.[iii] When she came home to Mississippi after having briefly lived in New York City—enrolled at Columbia University to study advertising (1930–1931)—the twenty-two-year-old Welty took pictures and considered photography as an art form and as a possible career path. She had been exposed to the medium in New York galleries and museums, and had also understood it as a commercial enterprise connected to the industry of marketing. Returning to Jackson in response to her father's losing battle with leukemia, she brought an altered eye and snapped shots of Mississippi scenes that, before New York, might have been either too removed from her family life in Belhaven or too routine in her surroundings to be observed.

The then twenty-seven-year-old Eudora Welty roamed rural Mississippi traveling for a briefly-held Works Progress Administration job as junior publicity agent, doing the fieldwork she needed to write about farm-to-market roads, juvenile courts, airfields made out of old pastures, county fairs, libraries—often traveling by bus and train.[iv] Taking photographs was not her job. But roving for her work and her personal education, she carried a camera and used it, like her fiction writing, as a tool to explore, to dare, to encounter. She described this exploration as a heart and eye-opener for a young woman who had been sheltered:

It was a matter of getting to see something of the state. I’d never seen any of it before, except on family car trips…I went to every county seat…It was a—I almost said “heart-opener”—a real eye-opener.[v]

Welty's photographs are the record of her traversing boundaries of class and race, exploring the state of Mississippi during the Great Depression—to see. The middle-class Jackson, Mississippi, pictured in the Welty family photos that are part of this exhibit is all but invisible in the images Welty herself made which, as much as anything, chronicle difference. 

An immediate context and backdrop for Welty’s own production in the 1930s was the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) image-making. Between 1935 and 1942, government photographers for the Resettlement Administration, renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937, captured more than 220,000 powerfully moving images of the Depression. The photographers’ assignment was to illustrate government projects and the social problems that these projects were to address. The group worked under the direction of Roy Stryker, the head of the historical section of the FSA. Interestingly, Welty was at Columbia University’s School of Business when Stryker was teaching introductory economics in 1931. His economics course was popular because he taught it with images: “He’d bring pictures to class…and would tack them to the walls and point. ‘You want to know about economics? Economics is not money. Economics is people. This is economics,’ he’d say about his pictures.”[vi] Documentary was the FSA's strategy, their objective, and their defined genre.

Welty was not an FSA photographer although she did once apply to Stryker for the job. And yet, Welty's photographic framing of Mississippi life is often read as social commentary, recording her response to the economic, gendered, and racial history of the South, but differing from FSA documentary images that first and foremost portrayed the challenges of poverty. Welty's camerawork breaks with these and other conventional and photographically familiar ways of seeing people and places.[vii] By contrast, she shows African American beauty—in such images as "Saturday off"[viii] and "Preachers and leaders of Holiness Church/Jackson."[ix] She captures female self-invention in portraits of Black working women creating social mobility, for example in "Schoolteacher on Friday afternoon,"[x] "Nurse at home/Hinds County,"[xi] and the Ida M'Toy series (image 1, image 2).[xii] And she conveys imaginative play and pleasure in such images as "Tall story" (in this exhibit, preliminarily captioned "Small Talk") and her "Pageant of Birds" series (image 1, image 2).[xiii] In these framings, Welty counters a long history of degrading photographic representations of African American subjects. And as Annette Trefzer has convincingly argued in Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections, Welty also shot "cultural landscapes, including town squares, fairgrounds, and cemeteries," in ways that "lay bare a geography of social inclusion and exclusion."[xiv]

Welty had at first thought about her photos as connected to a possible project she referred to as “Black Saturday,” a now-lost manuscript of stories and photos that in 1935 was submitted to the publishers Smith and Hass and rejected with the opinion that it would be impossible to publish a book so like Julia Peterkin’s 1933 Roll, Jordan, Roll.[xv] This response—that referenced work not much at all like Welty's, work that combined Peterkin's fiction (sometimes read as paternalistic) with Doris Ulmann's soft-focus, theatrical photographs of Gullah men and women—perhaps conveyed concerns for marketability producing a choice to avoid issues of race. There is no known record of which stories and photos were in the manuscript Welty submitted, which she said she eventually threw away.[xvi] Perhaps the "Saturday" section of One Time, One Place may bear resemblance to the photographic project's original conception.

That same year (1935), young Welty exhibited her photography along with the work of her friend Hubert Creekmore at the Mississippi State Fair. This “amateur class” exhibit was followed by two more professional New York City shows. Welty, who had on impulse stopped by Samuel Robbins' New York Lugene Opticians camera shop seeking technical advice, impressed Robbins, who eventually offered her two exhibits held at the Photographic Galleries of Lugene Inc. Opticians and at the Camera House in 1936 and 1937 respectively.[xvii] The very prints she made for the 1936 show are now available to view in the Eudora Welty Digital Archives Welty Photographs, Series 27.

But it was not until 1971 that Welty’s camerawork was first published in book form, in One Time, One Place, a project reflecting both the topics Welty was choosing to frame in the 1930s and the perspective that the 1960s civil rights movement in Mississippi had brought to the moment of her selections for the volume.[xviii]

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This Digital Snapshots exhibit selects a combination of well-known and previously unpublished photos from the digital archives and organizes them topically. It includes Welty family photos as well as images Welty made of Mississippians, of life in Mississippi, and of Mississippi landscape and architecture.