The Museum of Mobile opened a new exhibit this past Thursday called Exposures and Reflections.  The exhibit hosts photographs taken by Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer-prize winning Southern writer and photographer, during her time working as a junior publicist for the Works Progress Administration.  The images are paired with excerpts from her writings and period music to offer the viewer a panoramic experience of this great writer’s insight into the world around her.

These images tell a powerful story, both about life during that time and the way Welty saw her subjects.  She connected with those subjects on such a deep level that many short stories sprang forth from her encounters.  One of these stories is “Why I live at the PO,” which she wrote based on an encounter with a woman ironing at a post office.

Eudora Welty was a Mississippi native who achieved fame through her short stories, many of which are frequently anthologized.  Her ability to capture dialect so perfectly and show the gritty truths of poverty earned her numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1992.

This is the first traveling exhibit created by the Museum of Mobile and in conjunction with the Southern Literary Trail and Alabama Humanities Foundation.  After the exhibit closes here on October 31st, it goes on to Montgomery’s Rosa Parks Museum and then on throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.

The Museum of Mobile’s hours are: Tuesday-Saturday 9 AM-5 PM and Sunday 1 PM-5 PM.  Entrance is $5 for adults, $4 for senior citizens, $3 for students, and free for children under 6.  Visit the exhibit and experience a piece of life in the South in the 1930s and 1940s.  It may inspire you to see your own world in a new way, against the backdrop of history.