Eudora Welty: Exposures and Reflections (review)

The stated intent of Eudora Welty: Exposures and Reflections, currently at the Atlanta History Center,¹ is to explore "a unique relationship between Welty's written catalogue and her photographic images," claiming that, "despite Welty's assertion to the contrary," the relationship "creates an opportunity to explore more fully this twentieth century icon and the record of the Great Depression South she left the world at her death."

The exhibition is beautiful. Forty photographs shot by Welty in Mississippi during the Depression are displayed. Unfortunately, one enters with the misconception that the photographs were taken for the Works Projects Administration. They were not. In fact, Welty worked as a junior publicity agent, not a photographer, for five months between July and November 1936. As a result, her images are a more personal vision than might have been the case had they been taken for the WPA, and ultimately, more important for the difference.

The relationship between the photographs and her written catalogue is demonstrated, perhaps obliquely, by displays of early and less-familiar limited editions of Welty's published works (lent by John Bayne, who wrote the descriptions). Rather than displaying closed books, thus rendered mere artifacts, the texts are opened, Welty's words engaging the viewer.

Especially intriguing in 2011, when every cell phone boasts a digital camera, is the display of the three camera models—the Eastman Kodak six-16 (pre-1935); the Recomar (1935-36); and the Rolliflex (1937-1950)—used by Welty, and lent by Stephen Schwab, the Camera Doctor, of Atlanta. In light of the exhibition's stated intention, however, a similar display might include her typewriter, or copies of manuscript pages from the 1930s.

The video from the 2009 exhibit/conference at the City Museum of New York, "The Photography of Eudora Welty," features commentary by biographer Suzanne Marrs, novelist Reynolds Price, and PBS's Robert McNeill, among others. While informative, the repeated assertion that Welty's photographs (and writing, one may assume, in the exhibit's context) render visible previously invisible African Americans in 1930s Mississippi seems over-determined. The claim may be true, but a curator's selection can manipulate that perception. Nonetheless, since Welty's focus was unrestrained by the WPA's agenda, the racial mix evident in the images may well be an accurate reflection of her Mississippi. But from our distance from the Depression, we should approach her subjects, black and white, with Welty's admonition that, "Whatever [we] might think of those lives as symbols of a bad time, the human beings living them thought a good deal more of them than that," echoing in our heads (Foreword, One Time, One Place).

A human figure in a photograph inevitably invokes an implied narrative. This implication is amplified in Exposures and Reflections by passages from Welty's writing that illuminate or loosely interpret through their spatial proximity to particular photographs. My favorite, particularly because the quotation seems descriptive, not interpretive, is the pre-1935 "Sunday Morning." The subject is a young African-American girl in white—white dress, white socks, white shoes—tilting a black umbrella over her shoulder. The quotation is from The Ponder Heart: "They had her in a Sunday go-to-meeting dress.... Never washed or worn, just saved: white. She wouldn't have known herself in it." On the other hand, one might surmise from the child's expression that she knows herself entire in this dress.

The rationale behind including so many images of Mississippians, black and white, young and old, out of the thousand or so of Welty's extant negatives is largely justified, given that the show purports to relate her writing to her images. All but three of the images are of people, the essence of fiction. Almost two-thirds of the images chosen are of African Americans—men, women, and children, singly and in groups. The rest are of white people. Only one shows blacks and whites together, doubtless an accurate reflection of public and private...