Barefoot Boys and Smiling Girls: Re-reading Eudora Welty's Photographs of Childhood

Abstract: This essay puts Eudora Welty's photographs of children in conversation with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual precedents, situates them within the various twentieth-century contexts in which they were viewed, and examines the ways in which Welty's images both participate in and challenge traditional stereotypical representations of childhood and Black America. Studying her images of children in this way reveals that she was familiar with popular print culture and the discourse of racialized representations, which she then appropriated parodically, sometimes to comedic effect. Parody, as this essay shows, is a salient trope for interrogating social hierarchies and challenging the status quo, and one that Welty strategically employed to draw attention to the performative nature of gender, race, and class in the Jim Crow South. Finally, the piece reflects on the reception of Welty's images across time, arguing that they encouraged complex and contradictory interpretations by diverse audiences as they were exhibited and published in various formats and venues in the 1930s, 1970s, 1980s, and today.