Her literary legacy--not only her stories but her novels, essays, and reviews--traces the full arc of a writer's imagination. But the pictures bring us back to the time and the place it all began.-- "Smithsonian"
Reynolds Price, who wrote the foreword, detects in her short stories and novels the same 'instant indelible force' that we hope to find in a photograph--and do, in Ms. Welty's. . . . Above all, Ms. Welty stresses the importance of the subjects of her photographs.-- "New York Times"
This album of her black-and-white shots reveals a sensitivity to place augmented by a keen eye for drama.-- "Booklist"
Welty's portraits uncovered dignity and even joy in these hard years.-- "People Weekly"
We are better too for the soft still moments, the occasional humor, the quiet inarticulateness of many of the faces Eudora Welty has shared with us from her family album; and we remain grateful for her enduring consummate artistic honesty.-- "Sewanee Review"
Welcome both as the definitive collection of Welty's pictures and as an important part of her career: the foundation upon which the great edifice was built.-- "Washington Post Book World"
Welty captured a way of life in spontaneous scenes as lyrical and atmospheric as her fiction.-- "Chicago Tribune"
Thirty years after its publication, this defining monograph of the writer's photography has been revivified, thanks to digital scans of Welty's work. A new foreword by Natasha Trethewey joins Reynolds Price's original.-- "The New York Times Book Review, 5/17/2019"
Welty's photographs were, for me, a resource, a way to see a time and place I'd only encountered in history books and my grandmother's stories. I began writing poems with those images in mind, each one a starting place to anchor visually what I'd heard in the cadences of my grandmother's voice, how she'd say--reaching the end of a story--That's just the way it was.--from the new foreword by Natasha Trethewey
As a teenager in 1971, I first became aware that the great writer Eudora Welty was also a photographer. Her photographs had a profound effect on me. In addition to the actual images, perhaps as significant was Miss Welty's statement: 'A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was a part of it, born into it, taken for granted.' This gave me a framework for my own work. I was honored to have known her much later, and in 1999, to show her my book Delta Land, which was, in large part, an homage to her pioneering work chronicling Mississippi.--Maude Schuyler Clay