The Americans on this list will know that Eudora Welty
died this week. I'm not sure how well known she was
outside of the States. Suffice it to say that she was
one of the most significant novelists and short story
writers of the last century. She had won all of this
country's important literary awards--the Pulitzer
Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
American Book Award.
What I didn't know until I heard a lengthy obituary on
the radio is that she was a published photographer.
Yesterday I went off to the library to see what she
had done.
Virtually all of her published photos date from the
1930s, and most of it was shot in the towns and
countryside of Mississippi. Anyone familiar with the
work of the Farm Security Administration
photographers--Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, Dorothea
Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben
Shahn, et. al.--will recognize her subject, the life
of ordinary people, black and white, during the
depression. What's different is her style.
There's an relaxed intimacy about her photos that few
of the FSA photographers, for all their undoubted
brilliance, ever achieved. Wherever they went, the
FSA photographers were outsiders (Parks, arguably, was
an exception); Welty was at home.
The FSA photographers, under the direction of Roy
Stryker, were also out to make a point about the
dignity, resilience, and suffering of the American
working class at a time of terrible hardship. (There
was often tension between Stryker and his
photographers over the demands of politics, on the one
hand, and art, on the other.)
Welty wasn't making a point. She was doing what
writers do, observing the world around her with great
care and empathy. In an interview in _Eudora Welty:
Photographs_ (University Press of Mississippi, 1989),
she calls her photos "snapshots." She's not putting
herself down. She's alluding to her desire to observe
life, but not to comment on it or, at least, not to
comment very much (she saved that for her fiction).
For me, the beauty of Welty's photos lies in their
simplicity, their honesty, and, because of clarity of
her vision, their evocation of a particular time and
place.
Best, John
=====
John Edwin Mason
Charlottesville, Virginia
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
alt email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/
-
This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe,
go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to
visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
