Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties

“Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.”

— Eudora Welty

“[A] stirring and deeply personal glimpse into the lives of everyday people struggling to maintain dignity and courage in the face of one of the greatest catastrophes to hit America.”

— AAA Southern Traveler

A compassionate observer of the world as well as a passionate image-maker, Eudora Welty was a visual artist who used the camera with the same poetic facility as she used language as a writer. While Welty felt her primary medium was language, she continued to use a camera until 1950, when she left her Rolleiflex on a bench in the Paris Metro and, out of anger at her own carelessness, did not replace it.

This provocative exhibition developed by the Mississippi Museum of Art comprises over 100 works—all by notable American artists of the 1930s—including photographs, paintings, drawings, and prints.  At the center are Eudora Welty’s dramatic Depression-era photographs of Mississippi, Louisiana, and New York. Welty’s photographs from the thirties are placed alongside works by the artists Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton; photographers Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Ben Shahn, Margaret Bourke-White, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, and Dorothea Lange; and the Southern artists Walter Anderson, William Hollingsworth, Marie Hull, and Karl Wolfe. This juxtaposition opens an eloquent dialogue between Welty’s artistic motivation and the visual interpretations of other artists from this period.

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