Customer Reviews:
 Countryside dead July 14, 2008
"I always wanted to put together a book to be called 'Country Churchyards,' composed of the pictures I took in cemeteries."
So explains Eudora Welty to Hunter cole in 1999, only a couple years before her death. So it seems strangely appropriate that one of this great author's last works was a photographic record of various churches, graveyards and tombstones that she saw over her long lifetime. And "Country Churchyards" only proves Welty to be as brilliant and insightful a photographer as she was a writer.
Elizabeth Spencer spins out an essay about Welty and her attraction to churchyards, the Souther attitude to graves, as well as the transience of these monuments. It's a lovely piece of prose, especially since Spencer has quite a way with words (".... a quiet spot surrounded by an iron fence, entered by an ornamental wrought-iron gate, dripping grey with Spanish moss, m may be knowing in its silence that it is not forgotten any more than it forgot...").
But the stars of this book are indisputably Welty's photographs. The first few are striking but not terribly accomplished pictures of churches, as well as a lone statue of a tiara-wearing angel with one arm held up. It looks like it's waving.
But the pictures become more striking and more polished as the book goes on, and Welty's focus shifts to the more unusual churchyards -- ornate monuments, mossy stones surrounded by willows, striking churches veiled by fences and forests, statues of women weeping and drowsing, worried-looking saints, a life-sized Jesus carrying a cross, bas-reliefs of fallen trees, sleeping babies, and wrought-iron gates.
Not to mention the angels -- lots and lots of them, and only a couple are drippy child-cherubs. More often they are beautiful strong androgynes who are pointing at the horizon and watching over the graves. And the beauty of the graveyards themselves are brought to light occasionally, such as the misty sunlit pictures of vast leafy trees, flowers and tangled grasses, with a few tombstones among them.
Everybody loves a beautiful old graveyard, and I used to live near one of the loveliest ones you can imagine, crammed between a library and a busy side-street. Despite this, the exquisite old stones and elaborate Catholic statuary gave the whole area a feeling of peace.
So it's unsurprising that Eudora Welty, who spent a lifetime sketching eloquent, bittersweet, warm stories and novels about the South she grew up in, is able to convey all that beauty and history to her readers. And her photography is no less effective than her writing -- once she overcame the initial amateurish problems, Welty was able to infuse a lot of feeling into what she photographed.
The photos are all black-and-white, and most of them have a misty sunlit feeling. And Welty successfully gives many of her photographs a wistful, poignant feeling -- especially when she focuses on the little sleeping stone babies, or a stone dog waiting patiently on its master's grave. Then again, there are graves where you wonder what the designers were thinking -- for example, what is with all the SHEEP? Were some of these people unusually attached to their woolly bovines?
Additionally, the photos are also taken from a variety of angles, which is especially important when photographing the gorgeous old churches, or special shots like the angel watching the graveyard (who is photographed from behind). Accasionally you get the feeling that somebody has wandered into the photo -- such as one man who appears on horseback near a church, and seems surprised to see Welty's camera.
"Country Churchyards" is exactly what it sounds like, but in Eudora Welty's hands it became a sweet, melancholy chronicle of where the dead lie. A sweet little photographic record.
 Trading on Her Name March 17, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I obviously am coming late to this book. I've been a fan of Miss Welty's writing since growing up in the sixties. I actually wrote her a fan letter and got a reply and like a stupid child, didn't keep it.
I also own Miss Welty's other photo books. As a photo bug of forty years, I enjoyed her other work during the Depression, though it certainly was not special in itself. It is worth more as a historical record.
Upon buying this book I was surprised that it made it to publication. I have shot hundreds of the same type of photos traveling through small towns myself. These photos remain as did her earlier photographic work--snapshots of a time and a place. There's nothing wrong with snapshots, but I them for what they are: a historical record. Others have done much better work on cemeteries and gravestones.
I'm confident that, without Miss Welty's name, this book would never have reached publication.
 LOVE THIS BOOK! May 22, 2001
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
Did I say I love this book enough? Eudora Welty, the great Mississippi writer took these photographs many years ago. They cover churches and cemeteries around the Jackson area. Some of these places I know and have in my own collection of photos. Haunting places. There is much to be said of Welty's work with the camera. She has a great eye for detail, for light, and for mood. She has captured a period that is long gone. She loves angels. There are few commentaries because this is a book, not about words, but about churches, tombstones, and their lasting message. A great addition to both collectors of tombstone art and Eudora Welty's work. A classic. Buy it while you can. It will be a collectible one day.
More photographs from a writer's eye June 8, 2000
46 out of 46 found this review helpful
Those who cherish Eudora Welty's earlier collection of photographs (_One Time, One Place_) need no urging from me to sample this new jewel box of images from a Mississippi past. Like the earlier collection, these black-and-white photographs document the rural South of the 1930's and 1940's when Welty worked as a photographer for the WPA. As its title suggests, this book offers a tighter focus: on the burying-places of the rich and poor, the black and the white. Here be angels of all sorts, urns and chapels, sheep and dogs, children who seem but to sleep in masks of marble. Those who know Welty's keen gift for description will see how her eye for detail, setting and atmosphere was trained up in her early photographic work. Each image seems surrounded by the rich and generous spirit through which Welty sees the world and those who toil in it.The photographs are preceded by an account of a conversation with Miss Welty (as we Southern men and women of letters have learned to always refer to her) and interspersed with excerpts from the novels. Also a joy is the introduction by fellow Mississipian Elizabeth Spencer, who places these images in the landscape of Welty's fiction, as expressions of "Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." Spencer continues, "It must find its ceremony within family and community, and its symbols, beautifully displayed here, arise out of the beliefs and feelings of shared love." To spend time with this book is to walk among the mossy trees, rest among the cool white monuments, and feel the pull of that greater community which surrounds us. It gives further evidence why Miss Welty is one of our great national treasures. But I leave the last word to her, in this excerpt from _The Optimist's Daughter_: "The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other -- bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams."
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