Passionate Observer

This companion publication to a marvelous exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art (from April 6 through June 30, 2002) presents a selection of Eudora Welty's black-and-white photographs taken in the 1930s and shows how this acclaimed writer's second career as a photographer produced works that rank favorably with the visual art of her contemporaries. More than just a chronicle, this book features Welty among artists of her Deep South region (Walter Anderson, Richmond Barthe, William Hollingsworth Jr., Marie Hull, John McCrady, and Karl Wolfe) and from the nation (Berenice Abbott, Thomas Hart Benton, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Edward Hopper, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Grant Wood, and others). Included are twenty-seven of Welty's photographs and reproductions of other artworks from the exhibition, most in full color. This book is an exciting revelation of Welty, known chiefly as a fiction writer, as a power among visual artists as well. Rene Paul Barilleaux, deputy director for programs at the Mississippi Museum of Art, is the co-curator of the exhibition on which this book is based. Suzanne Marrs, a noted Welty scholar, is a professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. Patti Carr Black, co-curator of this exhibition and a former director of the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, is the author of many books, including Art in Mississippi, 1720-1980 (University Press of Mississippi). Francis V. O'Connor, a historian of American art and a specialist on New Deal art programs, lives in New York City.