5 - Eudora Welty

Summary

When Eudora Welty was a young woman just out of the University of Wisconsin and Columbia Business School, she briefly was a “publicity agent, junior grade” for the Works Progress Administration, and in that capacity she traveled over the eighty two counties of Mississippi, bringing her Kodak with her on bookmobile routes, into juvenile courts, and into Holiness Churches. Republishing those photographs many years later in One Time, One Place (1971) - she pointedly calls them “snapshots,” not only to make clear the casual and amateurish way she took them but also to make clear the relaxed, personal, one-on-one quality of the relationship between the people on both sides of the lens - she reflects that although these pictures were taken in the depth of the Depression, she was grateful that her beginner’s luck gave her what a more practiced method could not have given, “the blessing of showing me the real State of Mississippi, not the abstract state of the Depression.” In particular, she finds that the pictures she took conveyed more about their subjects than any thesis about the South she might have been attempting to prove.

It was with great dignity that many other portrait sitters agreed to be photographed, for the reason, they explained, that this would be the first picture taken of them in their lives. So I was able to give them something back, and though it might be that the picture would be to these poverty-marked men and women and children a sad souvenir, I am almost sure that it wasn’t all sad to them, wasn’t necessarily sad at all. If I took picture after picture out of simple high spirits and the joy of being alive, the way I began, I can add that in my subjects I met often with the same high spirits, the same joy. Trouble, even to the point of disaster, has its pale, and these defiant things of the spirit repeatedly go beyond it, joy the same as courage.