Eudora Welty at the NC Museum of Art

The North Carolina Museum of Art continues to deepen its engagement with Southern photography, now with a show of work by Distinguished Southern photographer Eurora Welty (see image above). 

This show, Looking South: Photographs by Eurora Welty, opened in April and is up through September 3rd, 2017.

The show of Welty's work includes 18 of Welty's images produced by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 1992.

The folks at Archives and History consulted with Welty about the selection of images and about Welty's preferred printing techniques when developing this portfolio with the goal of producing a portfolio representative of her photographs made in Mississippi in the 1930's and 1940's.

The folks at the NC Museum of Art note that "Welty’s iconic images of the South during this time bring to mind the photographs of Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, among others.  

"In comparing Welty’s work to Levitt’s photographs of New York, critic John Szarkowski wrote, 'Like those of Levitt, Welty’s photographs do not show us the only truths of her subjects’ lives; perhaps they show us only the rarest and most evanescent truths, in which case we are the more grateful for these proofs of their existence.'" 

Welty is of course best known as a writer of fiction. Good to be reminded by the NC Museum of Art that she was a distinguished visual artist as well as a verbal one.