Eudora Welty, Mississippi: le choix de l’oblique 

Abstract

Before becoming a writer, Eudora Welty started out as a photographer. Recruited for Roosevelt's New Deal by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) news service, she reported on the crisis in Mississippi in 1936, producing a body of images that would not be published until half a century later. This article examines the specificity of Welty’s visual rhetoric, in the political, social and cultural context of the Great Depression and in particular the way she addressed the color line issue, with her approach echoing Emily Dickinson’s verse: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”.

Keywords

• Mississippi
• photography
• FSA
• Great Depression
• Welty
• WPA