Serious Daring: The Fiction and Photography of Eudora Welty and Rosamond Purcell [Hardcover]

Serious Daringis the story of the complementary journeys of two American women artists, celebrated fiction writer Eudora Welty and internationally acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell, each of whom initially practiced, but then turned from, the art form ultimately pursued by the other.

For both Welty and Purcell, the art realized is full of the art seemingly abandoned. Welty’s short stories and novels use images of photographs, photographers, and photography. Purcell photographed books, texts, and writing.

Both women make compelling art out of the seeming tension between literary and visual cultures. Purcell wrote a memoir in which photographs became endnotes. Welty re-emerged as a photographer through the publication of four volumes of what she called her “snapshots,” magnificent black-and-white photographs of small-town Mississippi and New York City life.

Serious Daringis a fascinating look at how the road not taken can stubbornly accompany the chosen path, how what is seemingly left behind can become a haunting and vital presence in life and art.

“This book brings together two visionary modern artists of word and image by means of a link both ingenious and mysteriously actual: their mirror-image career trajectories towards and away from the photograph, Welty’s abandonment of photography for the language of fiction and Purcell’s of fictional prose for the language of light.  Susan Cole surges on a wave of insight, from image to image, verbal and photographic, in an offer of gorgeous phrases and visual motifs.  I found myself mourning, by the end, the fact that the two soul-sisters never met.  But Cole brings them as close as they can get, and in this book she exercises an art of her own: as silver-tongued critic and hawk-eyed observer she is an artist’s dream, in any medium, come true. Serious Daring, full of mesmerizing photographs, stal“7