Eudora and Zelda

Eudora Welty is best known for her short stories and novels depicting life in the South. But before her literary work was first published in 1936, she was hired as a publicist by the Works Progress Administration, a job that took her throughout rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. She brought along a camera to document her travels, and in 1971 her photographs were published in the book One Time, One Place. The Museum of Mobile has organized her photos into a traveling exhibit called Eudora Welty, Exposures and Reflections, developed with the Southern Literary Trail and funded through the Alabama Humanities Foundation. The exhibit opened in Mobile in September and runs through October 31. It will move to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery on November 11, where it can be viewed until January 7, 2011.

	Photos courtesy of Eudora Welty LLC and Miss. Dept. of Archives & History (click for larger version)

“All of Eudora Welty’s original negatives are archived in Jackson at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History,” says Birmingham attorney William Gantt, director of the Southern Literary Trail Project, which “celebrates writers of classic Southern literature” who hail from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. The Trail connects literary house museums and landmarks.

“For obvious reasons, [the Mississippi Department of Archives] is very picky about what negatives will be made into prints and what will not. Some of the negatives are too fragile to be put through the development process again.” The curator at the Museum of Mobile, Jacob Laurence, went to Jackson and worked with the Department of Archives and a local developer on the particular photos he wanted, learning what could be developed and what couldn’t. “We were really stunned at the quality of the images. They are just absolutely pristine, to come from 1930s-era Depression negatives,” Gantt says. The exhibit includes 40 photographs, which will eventually travel to Atlanta; Decatur, Alabama; and Columbus, Mississippi.

“Eudora Welty was a junior publicity agent for the WPA, but nobody can tell me what that job description entailed,” Gantt says, laughing. “Based on my own readings and conclusions, I think, basically, she went around Mississippi with what we would call a bookmobile. She really wanted to be a photographer, even before she wanted to be a writer. My understanding is that to be a photographer at that time, you had to be in the good ol’ boys club. So, as a woman, they didn’t take her seriously. So she took these photographs as she went around Mississippi.”

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Coinciding with the exhibit of Welty’s photos, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will display a collection of Zelda Fitzgerald’s artwork, primarily watercolors and paper dolls. “The Zelda stuff is real rare and fragile, it cannot travel,” explains Gantt. “Zelda was a painter and made paper dolls for her daughter. It’s remarkable artwork, but they don’t show it often.” The Fitzgerald exhibit will be on display from October 28 until January 9, 2011, at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, whose permanent collection includes 30 works by Fitzgerald, a Montgomery native married to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She suffered from mental illness and died in a fire at the North Carolina hospital where she lived out her life.

The dual exhibits in Montgomery are best summed up by Welty, who wrote in the foreword to One Place, One Time: “If exposure is essential, still more so is the reflection.” &

For dates, details, ticket prices and more, visit southernliterarytrail.org, fitzgeraldmuseum.net, or montgomery.troy.edu/rosaparks.

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