I’m reading Eudora Welty’s memoir “One Writer’s Beginnings,” an account of her upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi and her first stirrings as a writer, and searching for images to accompany the lucid, vivid prose.  Unmoved by the grainy family photos reproduced inside, I turned to Welty’s own well-known and well-regarded photos.  They’re something entirely different than her writing, compelling for their gentleness and physicality.

Welty learned how to use a camera when she was a teenager, and began taking professional shots when traveling through Mississippi in the 1930’s as a publicity agent for the WPA.  Her photos don’t have the dazzling graphic and compositional clarity of Walker Evans’ work or the lyrical melodrama of Dorothea Lange’s work.  What they have is a highly intelligent and sympathetic informality.  It’s easy to mistake them for snapshots but they feel so very old, as if they’re carrying history.  Welty took evocative architectural shots, like her famous one of the “Ruins of Windsor,” that capture shadow richly.  But it’s her portraits, especially those of southerners, that are most compelling.  The men and women in them haven’t been dramatized in any way but are indelibly present.  The images don’t linger in the mind but their subjects do.