This exhibition features a portfolio of 18 photographs by the acclaimed American novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty (1909–2001), produced by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 1992 (with Welty selecting the images and printing techniques) to represent the range of her photographs from the 1930s and early 1940s.
Welty’s iconic images of the South during this time bring to mind the photographs of Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, among others. In comparing Welty’s work to Levitt’s photographs of New York, critic John Szarkowski wrote, “Like those of Levitt, Welty’s photographs do not show us the only truths of her subjects’ lives; perhaps they show us only the rarest and most evanescent truths, in which case we are the more grateful for these proofs of their existence.”