With One Time, One Place Eudora Welty belongs to a very small group of artists who received the highest recognition for both literature and photography. When the book first appeared in 1971, Welty surprised her readers: many only then discovered that the celebrated writer was also a gifted photographer. To date, this is the only book for which she selected every image herself.
With One Time, One Place Eudora Welty’s photography was given a prominent place in book form for the first time. Although Welty became internationally known as a writer and won honors including the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter, photography was always part of her way of seeing. As early as the thirties, she used a compact camera to document daily life in Mississippi alongside her developing literary career.
Throughout her writing life, the camera remained a constant companion. Welty made the one hundred photographs in this book during the years of the Great Depression, while traveling through her home state of Mississippi. They show a world of poverty and hardship, but never without dignity.
Men, women, and children—Black and white—move through everyday life, unaware of their historical position. Welty’s gaze records rather than moralizes. As she writes: “The Depression was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the Union.”
In this new edition, all the images have been digitally rescanned. The goal was to maximize contrast and tonality. The result is not modernization but clarification: details become more visible and nuances richer, while the original sequence and intent remain fully intact. The photographs retain their documentary power while gaining visual depth.
“The Depression was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the Union.” ~ Eudora Welty
The foreword is by William Maxwell, Welty’s close friend and literary colleague, who places her photographic talent within her broader artistic world. His text offers not analysis but an appreciative perspective, fitting for a body of work that resists easy explanation yet is deeply affecting.
One Time, One Place is now regarded as a landmark in Southern photographic history. The images make clear that Welty’s storytelling was not limited to words. What she did with sentences in her stories, she did with her camera in moments of silence: capturing human endurance, community, and continuity—one time, in one place.
One Time, One Place - Eudora Welty
Pages: 134
Price: € 34.99
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi. Language: English.
