Windsor Ruins at Night

Eudora Welty is one of my favorite photographers.

She is most famous for her writing, having won a Pulitzer in 1973. It was around this time, incidentally, that her photographs were rediscovered and began gaining acclaim. By the 70’s Eudora was one of the most well known and respected writers in the world. She was a regular at the Algonquin’s Round Table, a haven for the brightest intellectual minds of the time. It is her pursuit of photography, however, that has always enamored me.

Early in her creative career Welty was as focused on image making as she was on words. Her approach was one of curiosity, but her technique was crude. It was her lack of technical skill that likely kept her from being accepted into the New School for Social Research in New York City where she hoped to study under famed photographer Berenice Abbott. I admire Welty’s tenacity and I find refuge in the fact that the bulk of her work took forty years to be recognized. Her most intense period of photography spanned the early 1930’s to the mid 1940’s. Her writing took off and her pursuit of photography slowly drifted away. But after accepting that her creative life would be one of words rather than images, the two came back together after years apart.

This is a lesson in time and patience to which I’ve increasingly become attentive. Eudora didn’t stop creating when she was rejected from one of the top photo schools in the world. She continued to follow her interests. She continued to make. She continued to share. Eventually, time smoothed the technical flaws of her work, and the photos garnered value for their intimate approach to documenting the parallel - though unequal - worlds of her segregated home.

All photos are created by time, then they are changed by time. The world morphs, so the meanings of what’s been documented does as well. The best any photographer can do is maintain a pure curiosity of the world, and recognize that the presence of a camera will always change the reality of the subject.

One of Welty’s most iconic images is a photo she made at Windsor Ruins, located in rural Claiborne County, Mississippi. This location serves as a kind of right-of-passage for Mississippi photographers. I’ve attempted to make images there many times over the years, and always find myself thinking of Eudora’s work. With the sun to her back, her strong shadow is seen leading the viewer into her photo. Welty’s image of the statuesque remains of southern opulence says as much about her place in that lineage as it does about the home that burned to the ground after a partygoer flicked a still-lit cigarette into the night air over one hundred and thirty years ago. I love the thought of her spirit existing in her photograph and at this site near the Mississippi River.

It was with this idea of ghostliness and presence that I made this photo on a clear night at Windsor. I wanted to pay homage to an idol of mine, as I often do in my making. This is that attempt.