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. 

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #6: Whitney Balliett's "Guernsey Gossip"

Whitney Balliett was a great listener, an inspired responder to sound. His jazz pieces are among the very best writings ever to appear in The New Yorker. A hallmark of the fifty book reviews he did for the magazine is his ear for the voice on the page. He was a connoisseur of “ear” writing. In a review titled “Families” (The New Yorker, August 17, 1987), he describes a group of novelists (Berry Morgan, Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Anne Tyler) as “‘ear’ writers” – writers “who can be read aloud with pleasure, and they sometimes set whole books in the vernacular.” It was high praise, indeed, if he said of a writer that he or she has “a good ear.” See, for example, his review of The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty (“Making The Jump,” The New Yorker, January 5, 1981), in which he praises Welty’s “fine comic ear.” In “Talking on Paper” (The New Yorker, December 10, 1984), his wonderful review of The Letters of Jean Rhys, he says,

These are, as she told Wyndham, talking-on-paper letters. Her small, tough, courteous, funny, angry, wise voice comes at us from Cornwall gales and Devonshire downpours, from weariness and illness (both frequent), from drink and beleaguerment. It talks and talks, and is an unstoppable human music that declares again and again that, no matter what, she is afloat and on course.

That “unstoppable human music” is very fine.

For #6 place on my “Top Ten,” I’ve chosen Balliett’s memorable ““Guernsey Gossip” (The New Yorker, June 1, 1981), a review of G. B. Edwards’ “nearly flawless” dialect novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. It begins with one of those lyrical, luminous figures that Balliett seemed to effortlessly conjure whenever he wanted to:

Fine opening paragraphs are like sunrises: they fill the mind with light and set up an irresistible momentum.

Four remarkable quotations – the first paragraphs of Duke Ellington’s Music Is My Mistress, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Peter De Vries’ The Vale of Laughter, and A. J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana – are followed by the opening passage of Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page:

Guernsey, Guernesey, Garnsai, Sarnia: so they say. Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I know I don’t know nothing, me. I am the oldest on the island, I think. Liza Quéripel from Pleinment say she is older; but I reckon she is putting it on. When she was a young woman, she used to have a birthday once every two or three years; but for years now she have been having two or three a year. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how old I am. My mother put it down on the front page of the big Bible; but she put down the day and the month, and forgot to put down the year. I suppose I could find out if I went to the Greffe; but I am not going to bother about that now.

Reading that, we know straight away that The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is apt to be something Balliett is strongly taken with. And we are right. Balliett describes the book as follows:

Ebenezer is literate but unbookish, and rarely puts pen to paper. So the book, like all first-person dialect novels, is an impossibility: it converts a fluid spoken language into a fixed imaginary written one. It makes sound visible.

It makes sound visible – that could stand as Balliett’s artistic credo - because for forty-nine years (1952 – 2001), that’s what he did at The New Yorker. Like all my “Top Ten” critics, Balliett is a great quoter. He introduces one of the best quotes in “Guernsey Gossip” this way: “His account of her [Ebenezer’s mother’s] death shows the cool, sure way this lovely book goes.”

Balliett doesn’t suspend his critical judgment; he never does; he can be biting when he wants to. But regarding The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, he merely says, “Unfortunately, the book goes soft toward the end.” You can tell from his descriptions of it, e.g., “So life churns beneath the book’s calm, circular, gossiping exterior” – that he’s totally smitten. What hooked him is Edwards’ “charming, crabbed, funny, articulate, rude, unerringly intelligent” talking-on-paper.

So far as I know, Balliett’s New Yorker book reviews are uncollected. If a collection came out, I’d snap it up in a flash. Meanwhile, if you want to read the pieces, you can go online to the New Yorker archive, where you’ll find all fifty, a wealth of incomparable book reviewing.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.