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But the trust was not at all the product of that time, as one can see in the contemporaneous accounts of black and white relations that are present in Richard Wright’s Black Boy or-from the other side of the racial divide-in James Agee’s narrative of his encounter with a black couple on a country road, early in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
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It is a trust that dates the pictures now, more than the vanished years.” That trust is indeed evident in the images of African Americans Welty reproduces in One Time, One Place, in the frank and sometimes mirthful expressions of her subjects, looking into the camera, and in their relaxed postures, young and old, as they work and play in their hometowns and rural areas. In particular, the photographs of black persons by a white person may not testify soon again to such intimacy. As she astutely notes, “n taking all these pictures, I was attended, I now know, by an angel-a presence of trust. Traveling around the state on various projects, talking with a range of residents from all counties, Welty began taking photographs for her own amusement, and also, as she puts it, as a “shy person’s protection.” That suggests a wall between photographer and subject, but Welty used the camera as a way of relating to people, enabling her to develop a bond of trust with her subjects, especially her African American ones. Government, instituted as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide jobs to a wide range of otherwise unemployed people, skilled and unskilled. She was employed as a “publicity agent, junior grade,” for the State of Mississippi, under the Works Progress Administration of the U.S. She was not, she tells us pointedly in the essay that introduces One Time, One Place, a government photographer. (And of course it was still unfolding in the seventies.)ĢWelty was a shrewd critic, and her own sense of her work as a photographer, when she introduced it in 1971, described beautifully what she was doing with her camera and how it related in fundamental terms to her fiction.
#Eudora welty writing style archive
But Welty seemed to exist so much by virtue of her extraordinary language, that to discover the archive of her visual work-the photographs she’d taken in the mid-1930s-forced us to reconsider the whole career. Welty in particular offered perhaps the most idiosyncratic voice and vision, focused on indelibly bizarre characters, sharp observations of setting, and a tense style that hovered on the edge of the comic and the grotesque. I had been reading Welty in graduate school as one of the great Southern writers to follow in the tracks of Faulkner, along with Katherine Ann Porter, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, an amazing generation of writers who had given the South the strongest regional presence in post World-War II American letters. 1I recall my shock, in 1971, on discovering Eudora Welty’s first collection of photographs, One Time, One Place: A Mississippi Album.