“Welty,” an exhibit featuring photographs by Eudora Welty, opens Monday at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library at 314 Seventh St. N. It will be up through Aug. 30.
During the 1930s, Eudora Welty traveled over her native state of Mississippi as publicist for the Works Progress Administration, photographing scenes and people that interested her. A few years later, her writing career was well-launched and her camera put away. It was not until the 1970s that the photographs were examined for their relationship to Welty”s writing. The juxtaposition of photographs-to-text offers a rare insight into the process of creativity.
The scenes that caught the photographer”s eye were images that settled into her being and became a source of her literary art. Through the alchemy of Welty”s genius and vision the images were transformed into lush passages of fiction.
The exhibit of 14 photographs was selected from over 1,200 Welty negatives on file in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The use of Welty”s fiction makes this a literary as well as a photographic exhibition, an opportunity to see how a single sensibility uses two media of expression.
In honor of the exhibit, Emma Richardson will present “Welty”s Schoolteachers: Heroic Portraits” Tuesday, July 27, at 2 p.m. in the Meeting Room of the library. Richardson, English teacher at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, will explore the numerous characters in Welty”s literature who are teachers and draw connections between her writing and her photography.
The public is invited to view “Welty,” an exhibit produced by the Museum Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). For more information about this exhibit or the Traveling Exhibits Program, contact the Museum Division with MDAH at 601-576-6800.
For more information about the exhibit while at the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, contact Mona Vance at 662-329-5304.
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