Eudora Welty.(Current and coming)

Celebrated as a writer of novels and short stories inspired by her native Mississippi, Eudora Welty was also, for a brief time, a photographer. Working under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, she traveled throughout Mississippi taking hundreds of snapshots of the people who intrigued her, developing her prints in her kitchen at night. She eagerly sought publication of her work through correspondence with photo editors in New York; this persistence paid off in 1936, when forty-five of her photographs were exhibited at the Photographic Galleries of the Lugene Opticians on Madison Avenue. Forty-one of those often grim black-and-white works are currently on view in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York entitled Eudora Welly in New York: Photographs of the Early 1930s, which also includes a selection of photographs she made in New York and focuses on her connections to the city.

The exhibition, organized by Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, demonstrates that Welly's long-admired talent of observation was not limited to the ear. "I learned quickly when to click the shutter," Welty recalled, "but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth ... My wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, ...