Photographs

As a teenager in 1971, I first became aware that the great writer Eudora Welty was also a photographer. Her photographs had a profound effect on me. In addition to the actual images, perhaps as significant was Miss Welty's statement: '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 a part of it, born into it, taken for granted.' This gave me a framework for my own work. I was honored to have known her much later, and in 1999, to show her my book Delta Land, which was, in large part, an homage to her pioneering work chronicling Mississippi.--Maude Schuyler Clay
Welty's photographs were, for me, a resource, a way to see a time and place I'd only encountered in history books and my grandmother's stories. I began writing poems with those images in mind, each one a starting place to anchor visually what I'd heard in the cadences of my grandmother's voice, how she'd say--reaching the end of a story--That's just the way it was.--from the new foreword by Natasha Trethewey