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Photographs

Photographs

By Eudora Welty
Foreword by Reynolds Price & Natasha Trethewey
Hardcover : 9781496821232, 232 pages, 252 b&w photographs, March 2019

In hardback again for the first time in thirty years, the definitive book of photographs by the Pulitzer Prize winner, including a new foreword by Natasha Trethewey and sixteen new photographs

Description

Eudora Welty’s Photographs, originally published in 1989, serves as the definitive book of the critically acclaimed writer’s photographs. Her camera’s viewfinder captured deep compassion and her artist’s sensibilities. Photographs is a deeply felt documentation of 1930s Mississippi taken by a keenly observant photographer who showed the human side of her subjects. Also included in the book are pictures from Welty’s travels to New York, New Orleans, South Carolina, Mexico, and Europe in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

The photographs in this edition are new digital scans of Welty’s original negatives and authentic prints, restoring the images to their original glory. It also features sixteen additional images, several of which were selected by Welty for her 1936 photography exhibit in New York City and have never before been reproduced for publication, along with a resonant, new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey.

Reviews

Reynolds Price, who wrote the foreword, detects in her short stories and novels the same ‘instant indelible force’ that we hope to find in a photograph—and do, in Ms. Welty's. . . . Above all, Ms. Welty stresses the importance of the subjects of her photographs.

- New York Times

Welcome both as the definitive collection of Welty’s pictures and as an important part of her career: the foundation upon which the great edifice was built.

- Washington Post Book World

Welty’s portraits uncovered dignity and even joy in these hard years.

- People Weekly

Her literary legacy—not only her stories but her novels, essays, and reviews—traces the full arc of a writer’s imagination. But the pictures bring us back to the time and the place it all began.

- Smithsonian

Welty captured a way of life in spontaneous scenes as lyrical and atmospheric as her fiction.

- Chicago Tribune

We are better too for the soft still moments, the occasional humor, the quiet inarticulateness of many of the faces Eudora Welty has shared with us from her family album; and we remain grateful for her enduring consummate artistic honesty.

- Sewanee Review

This album of her black-and-white shots reveals a sensitivity to place augmented by a keen eye for drama.

- Booklist

Thirty years after its publication, this defining monograph of the writer’s photography has been revivified, thanks to digital scans of Welty’s work. A new foreword by Natasha Trethewey joins Reynolds Price’s original.

- The New York Times Book Review, 5/17/2019

Welty’s photographs were, for me, a resource, a way to see a time and place I’d only encountered in history books and my grandmother’s stories. I began writing poems with those images in mind, each one a starting place to anchor visually what I’d heard in the cadences of my grandmother’s voice, how she’d say—reaching the end of a story—That’s just the way it was.

- from the new foreword by Natasha Trethewey

As a teenager in 1971, I first became aware that the great writer Eudora Welty was also a photographer. Her photographs had a profound effect on me. In addition to the actual images, perhaps as significant was Miss Welty’s statement: ‘A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was a part of it, born into it, taken for granted. ’ This gave me a framework for my own work. I was honored to have known her much later, and in 1999, to show her my book Delta Land, which was, in large part, an homage to her pioneering work chronicling Mississippi.

- Maude Schuyler Clay