Eudora Welty, photographer: "because I was part of it"

"Sunday Morning"

The photography of Eudora Welty is on view in a new exhibit, "Exposures and Reflections," at the Atlanta History Center now through May 8. Welty was a photographer before she was a writer; in 1936, after she learned that a magazine was going to publish two of her short stories, she was overjoyed. "I wanted acceptance and publication," she said later. "If they had paid me a million dollars it wouldn't have made any difference."

Many of her photographs of 1930s Mississippi feature African-Americans, who up to then were "socially invisible" in American society. Welty shows them on the street, window shopping, working, in family groups. T.A. Frail in The Smithsonian magazine of April 2009 notes that although Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business at Columbia University in New York, which helped "move her beyond the confines of her family environment."

She returned to Jackson after her father was diagnosed with leukemia, and began taking photography more seriously in a succession of writing jobs. In a 1989 interview excerpted here, Welty claims no larger agenda for her photographs other than her own, personal one. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said.

"Fairgrounds"

"While I was very well positioned for taking these pictures, I was rather oddly equipped for doing it," she would later write. "I came from a stable, sheltered, relatively happy home that by the time of the Depression and the early death of my father (which happened to us in the same year) had become comfortably enough off by small-town Southern standards." ...

It hardly mattered. Through the early '30s, Welty gathered a body of work remarkable for the photographer's choice of subjects and her ability to put them — or keep them — at ease. That is especially noteworthy given that many of her subjects were African-Americans. "While white people in a Deep South state like Mississippi were surrounded by blacks at the time ... they were socially invisible," the television journalist and author Robert MacNeil, a longtime friend of Welty's, said in an interview during a recent symposium on her work at the Museum of the City of New York. "In a way, these two decades before the civil rights movement began, these photographs of black people give us insight into a personality who saw the humanity of these people before we began officially to recognize them."

"Window Shopping"

Welty, for her part, would acknowledge that she moved "through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was part of it, born into it, taken for granted," but laid claim only to a personal agenda. "I was taking photographs of human beings because they were real life and they were there in front of me and that was the reality," she said in a 1989 interview. "I was the recorder of it. I wasn't trying to exhort the public"—in contrast, she noted, to Walker Evans and other American documentary photographers of the '30s. (When a collection of her pictures was published as One Time, One Place in 1971, she wrote: "This book is offered, I should explain, not as a social document but as a family album—which is something both less and more, but unadorned.") ...

In addition to "Exposures and Reflections" which opens today at the History Center, the Atlanta area is host to several other notable photography exhbits. The High Museum is displaying works by Henri Cartier-Bresson from Feb 19 to May 29th, and the Booth Museum in Cartersville has announced it has extended its Ansel Adams exhibit through March 13.

Neal Cassady (February 8, 1926-February 4, 1968)

Neal Cassady

(Charles Plymell)

An ego pressed onward

Like a tight skirt in the night

Popeye and Olive Oyl

Swaggering down the street

Jumping parking meters

doing exercise gyrations

Expectations surrounded him

in crowds and beach boy cronies

Tarot card sharks and wood shooters

The Fastest Gun in the West.

I showed him pictures

Of Butch and the wild bunch

"Neal, Was he your father?"

That worried orphaned-look

I'll not forget.

He lived fast, his beds, death rows

to blow genius away, like The Doors,

A race over rails from time's windowpane

sun hot on the Mexican landscape--the

Railroad tracks chromed with cocaine.

(from Six by Charles Plymell. Photo of Neal Cassady from Influx.)

"The great equalizer": A few words about libraries

Yesterday was the birthday of James Joyce. Today is the birthday of Gertrude Stein, Paul Auster, and James Michener. And we're lucky that public libraries still carry the works of all these writers available for no charge -- right there on the shelf, waiting to be picked up and discovered.

Public libraries, once considered such an important community asset that Andrew Carneigie financed their building in towns both large and small, continue their struggle to survive. Many are now in danger of becoming print's obsolete repository as more offer online services to stay open. Computer access is becoming more important to library services to such an extent that one Georgia library is considering removing the books all together and becoming, in essence, a Starbucks without the coffee.

The internet, in all its wonders, may not replace the thrill of discovery quite like finding the unexpected on library shelves. Of course the electronic wizard can always point the way for the curious reader. But most of us use the internet like a dowsing rod. Looking for something specific in the vast sea of knowledge and finding the gold coin glittering there is unlike browsing shelves in a library; the gold can sometimes be found in the search itself.

The student seeking "three facts about Rome" who helpfully adds the clarifier in a question, "It's a city in Italy?" may only need the internet for a 500-word paper. The student who discovers a book with reproductions of the art in the Sistine Chapel will make his own life-changing discovery in the stacks.

Even that old sage Keith Richards in his 2010 memoir confessed to a lifelong interest in libraries: "The Church belongs to God, but the library belongs to you," he writes about his own self-discovery reading in 1950s English libraries. In a system so tradition-bound, the young guitar-player with a passion for the blues found the library "a great equalizer" about ideas of class and station in everyday life.

A recent post by a writer on The Dabbler blog illuminates how this stumbling about in a public library can have unexpected results, and create an interest that continues to expand forty years on -- not just the in the search for information, but in the pleasure of reading itself.

... It was through public libraries that I found my way into reading -- real reading -- and as often as not it was a book picked off the shelf on little more than a whim that changed everything, opening up a new path that would enlarge my mind and soul and become part of my life. When I was still at school, I was mooching around in my small local public library, idly scanning the shelves, when I spotted a title I thought might be worth a look. I knew the author only as a playwright who had caused a bit of a stir in the Fifties, but this appeared to be a novel.

It might be interesting, I thought, picking it up. It was bound, I remember, in a muddy blue 'library binding', unpleasing to the eye and the hand alike, and on its spine was stamped in ugly black letters 'Molloy. S. Beckett'. I opened it and read: 'I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there...' I was hooked. I read Molloy with amazed delight and moved on to devour every Beckett I could get my hands on. And now, more than 40 years on, when most of my youthful literary enthusiasms have long since died the death, I am still reading (or rather rereading) Beckett.

I have just finished rereading Malone Dies, and it seems to me every bit as wonderful - no doubt in different ways - as it was to me then, more than 40 years ago. And this lifelong, ever-deepening love affair I owe to a chance find on the Fiction shelves of a suburban branch library. Could such things happen in the librariless or library-lite future that seems to be on its way?

(The four-volume complete Grove Press edition of Samuel Beckett's work was published in 2006, with series notes by Paul Auster. From his introduction: "Open anywhere and begin reading. It is an experience unequaled anywhere in the universe of words." Photo of Beckett from the website A Piece of Monologue.)