Review of Photographs, 2019

Eudora Welty's Photographs, updated and expanded with digital scans of the negatives and archival prints and a new, additional foreword by Natasha Trethewey, arrives on the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 volume of the same title.² Eighty years old at the time of original publication, Welty contributed to the selection and captioning of the photographs. During the preceding two decades, Welty had been nationally celebrated with a Book-of-the-Month Club novel (Losing Battles), a Pulitzer Prize (The Optimist's Daughter), a best-selling autobiography (One Writer's Beginnings), awards from Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan, more than thirty honorary doctorates, and several lifetime achievement awards. She was highly regarded, a recognizable powerhouse, but Welty's One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (Random House 1971) had been largely eclipsed by her prose.³ The coffee-table-worthy volume of 100 photographs, with its foreword by Reynolds Price, well-known author and Welty's friend, and an extended interview by Hunter Cole, marketing director for the University Press of Mississippi and Welty's friend, and Seetha Srinivasan, director of the press, was reviewed and recommended in more than twenty publications within six months of its launch. The interview and four photographs were reprinted in the New York Times Book Review beginning on page one and concluding on pages thirty to thirty- three (22 October 1989).

Photographs, 2019⁴ greets readers with different front- and back-dustjacket photographs than for the first edition. On the cover, "Jackson / 1930s"—a woman dressed in coat, hat, and gloves (who is given an interior life by Trethewey in her foreword essay "That's Just the Way It Was")—is enlarged from the 3 x 4-inch Recomar shot to show perhaps two-thirds of the portrait that can be seen in full in plate 8. The woman looks back at the photographer, and consequently the viewers of Photographs, as did the woman on the swing seen on the 1989 volume (plate 15 here). On the back cover is "Front yard / Yazoo County / 1930s" (plate 63), one of Welty's earliest photographs taken with her Kodak camera (2 ½ x 4 ¼ inch photos), replacing a slightly cropped portrait "Delegate / Jackson / 1938" and a statement by Welty drawn from the interview. Now, excerpts from Trethewey's foreword and a collage of quotations from the New York Times' 1989 review including a quotation from Reynolds Price speak out below "Front yard."

In addition to the new foreword, two other pieces of prose situate this new edition of Photographs. First, at the top of the inside front flap of the dust-jacket, is a comment by native Mississippi photographer Maude Schuyler Clay (Delta Land Photography, 1999, and Mississippi History, 2015, which was begun in 1975 with Clay's first Rolleiflex camera). Much as many fiction writers claim that reading Welty gave them the permission to tell their own stories, Clay cites Welty acknowledging that she was "well-positioned" to take her photographs because she "was a part of [the scene], born into it, taken for granted"⁵ and that Welty gave Clay "a framework for [her] own work." From 1971, first seeing Welty's visual work, to 1999, showing Welty her Delta Land photographs, to 2019, seeing Photographs in this new edition, Clay is particularly suited to introduce the new volume. In addition, Welty's May 1999 acknowledgements are here matched by those of Welty's niece Mary Alice Welty White, October 2018, thanking the University Press of Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) and the Eudora Welty Collection responsible for the 1989 and 2019 Photographs. White gives special appreciation to Forrest Galey, Special Projects Officer in the Archives and Record Services Division of MDAH for her "meticulous care of each of the images," Suzanne Marrs (White's friend as well as Welty's), and her grandfather, Welty's father, "for introducing" Welty to the camera ([vii]). The 2019 updated and expanded edition is the fine result of the collaborative efforts of...