In partnership with the Southern Literary Trail and Alabama Humanities Foundation, the Museum of Mobile opens an exciting exhibit of the photographic and literary works of famed Southern writer Eudora Welty.  Eudora Welty- Exposures and Reflections will open at the Museum of Mobile September 2, 2010.

During the 1930s, while a junior publicist, Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her around her native state of Mississippi.  On her own time, she took some memorable photographs during the Great Depression of people from all economic and social classes.  Collections of her photographs were published as One Time, One Place (1971) and Photographs (1989).  Her photography was the basis for several of her short stories, including "Why I Live at PO", which was inspired by a woman she photographed ironing in the back of a small post office.

As her writing career progressed, many of the people she continued to photograph inspired in some way the characters she developed.  While Welty herself saw the two art forms as “parallel activities,” the written works can easily be paired with many of her photographic images. 

Forty photographs and excerpts from Welty’s written catalogue will harness the powerful creative spirit of one of the South’s great twentieth century writers and will open up to younger generations an opportunity to see a mere glimpse of Southern life in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

The Museum of Mobile has developed this as a traveling exhibit, which after its first showing here at the Museum will travel to Montgomery’s Rosa Parks Museum and throughout Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.