Country Churchyards
The doyenne of southern letters has enjoyed an avocation in photography in addition to her vocation of writing. In fact, Welty worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s, traveling around her native Mississippi, documenting the ways of life distinctive to that state. One of the "themes" of those photographs was country churchyards, and 90 of those particular images have now been gathered into this album. Welty's friend and fellow southern fiction writer Elizabeth Spencer supplies a beautiful introduction, in which she connects Welty's interests and sensibilities to what she observed and absorbed as she explored the cemeteries of rural Mississippi. "What seems to speak most plainly to me," Spencer relates, "is Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." And the richly textured black-and-white photographs boldly but also enchantingly remind the viewer of that correlation.Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved