Eudora Welty et la photographie: Naissance d’une vision by Géraldine Chouard (review)

If critics worldwide are in the majority aware of the written production of Welty, many still ignore the vast photographic enterprise the Mississippi-born writer established in the 1930s. As French scholar and critic Géraldine Chouard explains in her introduction to Naissance d’une Vision: Eudora Welty et la photographie (Birth of a Vision: Eudora Welty and Photography), Welty’s photographs started being (re)discovered during the 1970s in the United States, with One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (1978), the development of feminism and postmodernism, many other collections large and small of photographs, and scholarly essays on the historical and literary contexts of the photographs, and culminating in 2009 with Eudora Welty as Photographer. The publication of Chouard’s Eudora Welty et la photographie brings a new building block to the development of a worldwide awareness of the importance of Welty’s photographic work as the first book-length published research on the subject. In this beautiful 178-page book illustrated with forty full-page black-and-white photographs by Welty or of Welty and/or her family (plus one Welty drawing), Chouard seeks through a global analysis of Welty’s photographs to retrace the emergence of what she sees as the “Weltian vision,” a vision that has both influenced Welty’s writing and has been influenced by literary references. It is a constant and productive dialogue between the written word and the photographic subject. After reminding her audience of the importance of Welty in the field of American—and more specifically southern—literature, Chouard studies in her first chapter Welty’s childhood and her discovery of the photographic medium, always carefully placing the family story in the context of the American 1920s. Following the tracing of Welty’s photographic career from the acquisition of her first camera in 1922 at age thirteen to her relative abandonment of the practice following the publication of “Death of a Traveling Salesman” in 1936, Chouard focuses on Welty’s contribution to the documentary photography movement developed during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. In this second chapter, she demonstrates how Welty, through her involvement with the Work’s Progress Administration (WPA) as a junior publicity agent, offers in her snapshots a perspective widely different from what was done by the more famous photographers at the time, such as Dorothea Lange or Doris Ulmann. Not only does Welty portray primarily the South in her pictures, offering a very personal vision of the local characters and landscapes, she also focuses on the African-American population. The percentage of Welty’s photographs depicting blacks or blacks with whites approaches 75%, according to Chouard, in clear contrast with the official recommendations of both the WPA and Farm Security Administration (FSA). As Chouard reads the record, Welty preferred to gently yet skillfully raise the curtain on the current situation of the South, always trying to stress the importance of celebration and (sometimes ambiguous) fraternity in her pictures rather than exploiting the misery of the African-American population.

Through the use of many extracts from Welty’s literary works, the next chapter deals with the already mentioned essential relationship between Welty’s photographic and written productions. Through a detailed comparative analysis of stories and novels, Chouard unveils the different perspectives given by Welty to the photographic medium in her texts—for example, the importance of the pulsion scopique, a Freudian and Lacanian term concerning the pleasure of seeing, of imagined images, in “Why I Live at the P. O.” and the photographic illusion in Losing Battles. The next chapter debates the notion of “autophotobiography” and details the importance of the spoken word in Welty’s texts and photographs. Chouard also stresses the adventurous nature of the writer who, contrary to the traditional image of the southern lady staying home for her whole life, traveled extensively and photographed people and places in Mexico City, Paris, Cambridge, and Sienna...