History Is Lunch: Suzanne Marrs and Seetha Srinivasan, 'Eudora Welty’s Photographs'

On April 17, 2019, Suzanne Marrs and Seetha Srinivasan presented "Eudora Welty’s Photographs" as part of the History Is Lunch series.

“Originally published in 1989 by the University Press of Mississippi under the direction of Seetha Srinivasan, Photographs is a deeply felt documentation of 1930s Mississippi taken by a keenly observant photographer who showed the human side of her subjects,” said Marrs. Also included in the book are pictures from Welty's travels to New York, New Orleans, South Carolina, Mexico, and Europe in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

The photographs in the new edition are new digital scans of Welty's original negatives and authentic prints, restoring the images to their original glory. It also features sixteen additional images, several of which were selected by Welty for her 1936 photography exhibit in New York City and have never before been reproduced for publication.

In her new foreword to the book, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natasha Trethewey said “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.”

Suzanne Marrs is professor emerita of English at Millsaps College. She is the author of Eudora Welty, A Biography and One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, editor of What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, and co-editor with Tom Nolan of Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. Marrs received the 1998 Phoenix Award for Outstanding Welty Scholarship from the Eudora Welty Society.

Seetha Srinivasan is director emerita of the University Press of Mississippi. She served as president of the Association of American University Presses in 2003-04. Srinivasan is the former chair of the Women’s Foundation of Mississippi and serves on the boards of St. Andrew’s School and Mississippi Today.

History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,

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