Washington, D.C. – The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) will present Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty, highlighting over 50 of Welty’s black-and-white photographs from the 1930s. The photographs will be on view from Oct. 27, 2003, through Feb. 29, 2004. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Welty (1909-2001), a native of Mississippi best known for her novels and short stories of life in the South, was also an accomplished photographer.

“These works reveal the compassion Eudora Welty felt for the people of Mississippi from all walks of life during a difficult time in American history,” says NMWA Director Judy L. Larson, Ph.D.

Though Welty’s fame rests on her career as a writer, she initially sought to record the world with both words and images. Most of her photographs were taken in small towns and rural areas of Mississippi, as well as nearby New Orleans. While she briefly lived in New York City, she also explored urban life.

Welty’s photographs, like her celebrated fiction and non-fiction, show the courage and dignity of her subjects. She said that her purpose in photography, as in her writing, was “…not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.” Indicating how she valued the unpredictability of the moment, Welty referred to her photographs as snapshots. “They were taken spontaneously to catch something as I came upon it,” she said, “something that spoke of the life going on around me. A snapshot’s now or never.”

Eudora Welty grew up with photography in Jackson, Miss. Her father was an avid photographer of his family’s life and travels. Welty followed his lead and began taking pictures, making her own prints in a makeshift darkroom. She and her friends used the camera for entertainment, photographing each other in amusing and satiric poses. Around 1929, Welty began to practice photography in more aesthetic terms. She did not pose her subjects, but composed the pictures by cropping them later. As photography became increasingly important to her, she purchased more advanced cameras, expanding her technical range and subject matter on travels through the South and abroad.

As Welty’s skills in photography improved, she considered using it as her primary livelihood. Life magazine published her photographs in 1937 and 1938, and Welty continued to take photographs throughout the decade. While Welty took many photographs on assignments in her jobs with the Works Progress Administration and the Mississippi Advertising Commission, she also created images reflecting her own artistic interests. The latter photographs were exhibited in New York City in 1936 and 1937.

Welty’s empathy for the dignity of the individual, which is reflected in her writing as well as photography, encompassed all of society. She did not directly address the racial tensions that plagued the South in the 20th century. In response to criticism for this decision, Welty said in 1976, “…to distort a work of passion for the sake of a cause is to cheat, and the end, far from justifying the means, is fairly sure to be lost with it.” Author Toni Morrison observed that Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing – it’s the way they should be written about.”

The success of Welty’s first book of short stories, published in 1941, influenced her decision to concentrate on a writing career. From this point forward, her career as a photographer was largely behind her. But the emotionally rich images she found through her camera would inform her fiction long after her photographic activities had ceased. While her photographs were distributed through limited-edition portfolios and in books during her lifetime, her photographic work was not widely exhibited until after her death.

“Delegate, Jackson” (post 1936) is one of many works in the NMWA exhibition that illustrates Welty’s perspective as a knowledgeable insider. Her subject, an older woman festooned with ceremonial buttons, peers self-confidently at the camera. Her formal pose is in sharp contrast to the casual bearing of the male figures behind her. Similarly, her photograph “A Woman of the ‘Thirties, Jackson” (1935/1936) shows Welty’s interest in capturing the dignity and pride of her subjects.

Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty is organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Miss., and circulated by International Arts & Artists, Inc., Washington, D.C. Photographs are from the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Eudora Welty Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson. Curator is Rene Paul Barilleaux, deputy director for programs, Mississippi Museum of Art, and NMWA curator is Britta Konau, associate curator of modern and contemporary art.

A companion book, Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties, is available in the NMWA Museum Shop for $30.00.

Presentation of the exhibition at the women’s museum is made possible through the Mississippi State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. NMWA has established 27 state committees and two international committees, all of which promote the museum’s mission through events, exhibitions, and education programs.

On Dec. 7, an evening of film in conjunction with the exhibition, also supported by the NMWA Mississippi Committee, will feature three adaptations of Welty’s fiction and a 1994 interview with the author. For more information, visit www.nmwa.org/calendar.

Admission to the museum during the time of Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty will be $8 for adults, $6 for students and visitors 60 and over, and free for NMWA members and youth 18 and under. Free Community Days are the first Sunday and Wednesday of each month.

About the women’s museum

The National Museum of Women in the Arts, founded in 1981 and opened in 1987, is the only museum dedicated solely to celebrating the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. Its permanent collection contains works by more than 800 artists, including Judith Leyster,
Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Elizabeth Catlett,
Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Bourgeois. The museum also conducts multidisciplinary programs for diverse audiences, maintains a Library and Research Center, publishes a quarterly magazine, and has organized 27 state committees. Nearly 120,000 people visit the museum each year, including thousands of young people who come with schools and scouting groups. NMWA’s national membership of nearly 40,000 is among the top ten percent of museum memberships nationwide. The museum is located at 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC, in a landmark building near the White House. It is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. and Sunday noon - 5 p.m. For information call 202.783.5000 or visit the museum’s website, www.nmwa.org.