Eudora Welty Images Of Life In The South Analysis

Eudora Welty’s Images of Life in the South Eudora Welty is well known as a southern writer, but has also been recognized as a talented photographer. Demonstrating an innate sense of vision, Welty is able, through both her writing and her photography, to provide intimate images of life in the south. Welty was born in 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. From a very early age she had an interest in story-telling, which developed into a love of writing. Even before entering her teens, Welty published several pieces in children’s magazines. Her first important short story was published in 1936, and was followed by considerable success as a writer. Welty’s photography, by her own account, is something she “stumbled into.” Her first job in journalism was as a junior publicity agent with the state office of the Works Progress Administration. She traveled all over the state of Mississippi documenting the success of President Roosevelt’s measures combating the Great Depression. In the course of her work, she wrote stories for local papers and also took hundreds of photographs which she says show “life as [she] found it” and now “constitute a record of that desolate period” (Welty 84). The book One Time, One Place is a published collection of the depression-era photos of …show more content…
She was aware of a connection between the two art forms and found that lessons she learned with a camera could also be useful to her in her writing. In her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty discusses the conscious act of getting her distance. She says that it is “a prerequisite of [her] understanding of human events,” and it is “the way [she] begin[s] work” (Welty 21). She compares getting her distance before writing, to the distance in photography which is needed to determine the various elements such as frame, proportion, perspective, or light and