Passionate Observer

Art -- Photography 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 Barth , 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. Ren 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.