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. 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. 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.
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(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.įor 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 graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business for a year at Columbia University. 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. Her father died of leukemia in 1931, at age 52. "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." "While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. 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. But more than that, they show the photographer's wide-ranging curiosity and unstinting empathy-which would mark her work as a writer, too.
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 before she published a single one of her many short stories, she had a one-woman show of her photographs. Henry Awards and the Medal of Freedom, to name just a few. After a year in graduate school in New York City, Eudora Welty returned to her native Mississippi and began taking pictures ( Home by Dark).Ĭopyright Eudora Welty, LLC Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and HistoryĮudora 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.
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