Favorite Photo Reviews 7: Eudora Welty's "One Time, One Place"

Eudora Welty, Woman in Thirties (193x)

This is the fourth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Eudora Welty’s “One Time, One Place” (included in her 1978 essay collection The Eye of the Story).

In this piece, which originally appeared as the Preface to Welty’s One Time, One Place: A Snapshot Album (1970), Welty reviews her own photography. She begins, “These photographs are my present choices from several hundred I made in Mississippi when I had just come home from college and into the Depression.”

Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as publicity agent for the State office. In this capacity, she travelled around Mississippi, 

visiting the newly opened farm-to-market roads or the new airfields hacked out of old cow pastures, interviewing a judge in some new juvenile court, riding along on a Bookmobile route and distributing books into open hands like the treasures they were, helping put up booths in country fairs, and at night, in some country-town hotel room under a loud electric fan, writing the Projects up for the county weeklies to print if they found the space.

She says, “In no time, I was taking a camera with me.”

She says the meaning she extracted from her travels was always “personal and particular” (“The message was personal and particular. More than what is phenomenal, that strikes home. It happened to me everywhere I went, and I took these pictures”).

She used a “Kodak model one step more advanced than the Brownie.” The local Standard Photo Company of Jackson developed her rolls of film, and she made herself a contact-print frame and printed at night in the kitchen when she was home. She says, “With good fortune, I secured an enlarger at secondhand from the State Highway Department, which went on the kitchen table. It had a single shutter-opening, and I timed exposures by a trial-and-error system of countdown.”

Her assessment of her photos is modest. She writes, 

This is not to apologize for these crudities, because I think what merit the pictures do have has nothing to do with how they were made: their merit lies entirely in their subject matter. I presume to put them into a book now because I feel that, taken all together, they cannot help but amount to a record of a kind - a record of fact, putting together some of the elements of one time and one place.

She says, “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 part of it, born into it, taken for granted.”

She refers to her photos as “snapshots”:

The book is like an album as well in that the pictures all are snapshots. It will be evident that the majority of them were snapped without the awareness of the subjects or with only their peripheral awareness. These ought to be the best, but I’m not sure they are. The snapshots made with people’s awareness are, for the most part, just as unposed: I simply asked people if they would mind going on with what they were doing and letting me take a picture. I can’t remember ever being met with a demurrer stronger than amusement. (The lady bootlegger, the one in the fedora with the drawn-back icepick, was only pretending to drive me away - it was a joke; she knew I hadn’t come to turn her in.)

She says of her “poverty-marked” subjects,

Whatever you might think of those lives as symbols of a bad time, the human beings who were living them thought a good deal more of them than that. If I took picture after picture out of simple high spirits and the joy of being alive, the way I began, I can add that in my subjects I met often with the same high spirits, the same joy. Trouble, even to the point of disaster, has its pale, and these defiant things of the spirit repeatedly go beyond it, joy the same as courage.

Welty identifies trust as one of her photography’s main ingredients:

In taking all these pictures, I was attended, I now know, by an angel - a presence of trust. In particular, the photographs of black persons by a white person may not testify soon again to such intimacy. It is trust that dates the pictures now, more than the vanished years.

She describes her camera as an “eye”:

The camera I focused in front of me may have been a shy person’s protection, in which I see no harm. It was an eye though - not quite mine, but a quicker and an unblinking one - and it couldn’t see pain where it looked, or give any, though neither it could it catch effervescence, color, transience, kindness, or what was not there. It was what I used, at any rate, and like any tool, it used me.

She says of her portraits,

When a heroic face like that of the woman in the buttoned sweater - who I think must come first in this book - looks back at me from her picture, what I respond to now, just as I did the first time, is not the Depression, not the Black, not the South, not even the perennially sorry state of the whole world, but the story of her life in her face. And though I did not take these pictures to prove anything, I think they most assuredly do show something - which is to make a far better claim for them. Her face to me is full of meaning more truthful and more terrible and, I think, more noble than any generalization about people could have prepared me for or could describe for me now. I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

She says of her process,

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people will reveal themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment when you see it. The human face and the human body are eloquent in themselves, and a snapshot is a moment’s glimpse (as a story may be a long look, a growing contemplation) into what never stops moving, never ceases to express for itself something of our common feeling. Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then when it does come, how unpredictable it turns out to be, after all.

That “Every feeling waits upon its gesture” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired! Welty was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “One Time, One Place” is one of her best pieces.