June 2 - October 31, 2012 (One-time event) - Close to Home: Photographs by Eudora Welty

People at work, at worship, at the Mississippi State Fair, and at home are captured in Eudora Welty's photographs in the exhibition, Close to Home: Photographs by Eudora Welty. Organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, this exhibition features subjects taken by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author in Hinds County and surrounding counties in the 1930s and is on view at the Museum of the Mississippi Delta from June 2 until October 31. 

A lifelong resident of Jackson except during her university years, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) went to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a junior publicity agent at age twenty-six. Her primary job with the work relief program was to write about WPA-funded projects. While traveling Mississippi for the WPA, she also photographed the people she met and the towns she visited. Some of the photographs, taken in the rural counties surrounding the capital city, as well as in Jackson, are included in this exhibition.

Although Welty is most celebrated for her literary achievements, her career began with a desire to be a photographer as much as a writer. Some of the photographs on view predate her first published story in 1936. That same year, her photographs were exhibited in New York City at the Photographic Galleries of Lugene Opticians.

"Eudora Welty quietly observed with her camera as well as with her pen, and the photographs show that she interacted with the people she photographed," said Beth Batton, MMA Curator of the Collection. "This gives us a view into 1930s Mississippi and helps us feel that we are there, entering a church, talking to a mother and her child, or on the midway at the State Fair."

Close to Home: Photographs by Eudora Welty is organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and supported with funds provided by the Museum's statewide Traveling Exhibition Endowment, a fund made possible through significant private contributions matched by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, with additional funding provided by the Mississippi Arts Commission’s Arts Reinvestment Initiative.ked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression and was assigned to write about WPA-funded projects. As she traveled throughout Mississippi, she photographed the people she met and the towns she visited during the 1930’s.