Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw was the first woman to win an Academy Award for her work shooting the 2025 film, “Sinners.”
“The mystery of how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much.”
— from “The Optimist’s Daughter” by Eudora Welty
The horror film, set in 1932 Clarksdale, was written and directed by Ryan Coogler. Before shooting began, Coogler gave Durald Arkapaw a copy of author Eudora Welty’s book of Mississippi Great Depression-era photos, “One Time One Place,” for inspiration. Durald Arkapaw told the New York Times in a March 3, 2026 article that she was “guided by Welty’s 1930’s photos.”
As Welty’s enormous influence on both American letters and pop culture continues today, University Press of Mississippi has re-released 1971’s “One Time One Place.” The 100 photos in the book have been digitally scanned to maximize the contrast and beauty of Welty’s vision, according to the publisher.
The photos in the book were shot before the Jackson author became a world-renowned short story writer and novelist.
After Welty attended Columbia University as a graduate student in New York City during the Great Depression, she returned to Mississippi in 1931 because her father was ill. Following his death, she remained in Jackson, unable to find a job in New York City during that time.
After working at WJDX radio and at assorted part-time jobs, in 1936, Welty began work as a junior publicity agent for the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Her job was to travel around the state’s 82 counties to write about different WPA projects underway. During her travels, Welty carried her camera and took snapshots of the places and people she met throughout the state.
Welty’s niece, Mary Alice Welty White, said her aunt’s photos captured the everyday humanity of the state’s residents.
“The photos were compassionate. The people in them are so proud. It really captures the common, day in the life of people during that time,” White said.
White also said Welty did not ask people to pose for her photos.
“She just captured a moment. Caught them as they were. I just think she had a good eye,” White said.
In the book’s original preface, Welty wrote that any “merit the pictures do have has nothing to do with how they were made: their merit lies entirely in the subject matter.”
Suzanne Marrs, author of 2005’s “Eudora Welty: A Biography” and a Welty historian, disagreed with her subject’s assessment.
“No. I don’t agree with that. Of course I don’t. She was being very modest. She was able to capture what she did because she recognized moments and people in ways others would not have. Her photos are magnificent,” Marrs said.
Novelist and Welty friend William Maxwell also disagreed with the author.
In Maxwell’s 1995 forward to the book, he wrote, “I am inclined to take exception, however, to her statement that the merit of these photographs lies entirely in the subject matter. Other people could have focused a camera on the same scenes and human situations, and they would have not caught what she caught.”
Welty’s job traveling around the state and shooting her photos had a profound impact on her literary pursuits.
Welty went on to write award-winning stories such as “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “A Worn Path,” and “Petrified Man.” She also penned the novels, “Delta Wedding” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 book, “The Optimist’s Daughter.”
Writer W. Ralph Eubanks, author of “A Place like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape,” described the impact this way.
“Eudora Welty’s photographs of Depression-era Mississippi reveal how the place she loved opened a door in her mind, allowing her to see the entire expanse of the Magnolia State as her literary canvas. These images are as much a part of Welty’s literary legacy as her books and stories.”
Marrs said Welty was able to visit parts of the state she might not have seen otherwise as part of her WPA job.
“Observation of place definitely informs what you do as a writer,” Marrs said.
As an example, Marrs said Welty did not consult her photographs when writing about place but often drew on memories of places she had photographed. Seeing the ruins of Windsor near Port Gibson and bottle trees in Simpson County led to photos while recalling the sight of them led to the stories “Asphodel” and “Livvie.”
White said Welty’s WPA job opened her aunt’s eyes to all of Mississippi.
White said she remembered Welty once commenting on the first photo in the book. The photo is a portrait of a black woman that is on the left page facing the book’s title page.
“I remember she said, ‘Look how proud she is.’ She’s standing there in that tattered and torn sweater,” White said.
In the preface of the book, Welty wrote of the first photo, “When a heroic face like that of the woman in the buttoned sweater — who I think must come first in this book — looks back at me from her picture, what I respond to now, just as I did the first time, is not the Depression, not the Black, not the South, not even the perennially sorry state of the whole world, but the story of her life in her face.”
Welty was able to tell stories with her pen and her camera.
Despite the poverty of Mississippi as well as the Great Depression backdrop of the photos, no one appears to look miserable in Welty’s photographs.
“These photos reveal the humanity, the vulnerability, and the resilience of the people Welty met and introduces to us on the pages of “One Time, One Place,”’ Marrs said.
Going back to the photo of the woman in the sweater that opens the book, Welty wrote in the preface, “Her face to me is full of meaning more truthful and more terrible and, I think, more noble than any generalization about people could have prepared me for or could describe for me now. I learned from my own picture, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.”
For more information about the book, click here.
Photos by Eudora Welty. Courtesy of University Press of Mississippi.
