I’m reading Eudora Welty’s memoir “One Writer’s Beginnings,” an account of her upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi and her first stirrings as a writer, and searching for images to accompany the lucid, vivid prose.  Unmoved by the grainy family photos reproduced inside, I turned to Welty’s own well-known and well-regarded photos.  They’re something entirely different than her writing, compelling for their gentleness and physicality.

Welty learned how to use a camera when she was a teenager, and began taking professional shots when traveling through Mississippi in the 1930’s as a publicity agent for the WPA.  Her photos don’t have the dazzling graphic and compositional clarity of Walker Evans’ work or the lyrical melodrama of Dorothea Lange’s work.  What they have is a highly intelligent and sympathetic informality.  It’s easy to mistake them for snapshots but they feel so very old, as if they’re carrying history.  Welty took evocative architectural shots, like her famous one of the “Ruins of Windsor,” that capture shadow richly.  But it’s her portraits, especially those of southerners, that are most compelling.  The men and women in them haven’t been dramatized in any way but are indelibly present.  The images don’t linger in the mind but their subjects do. 

The Museum of Liverpool

Photography by Jeffrey Kilmer

The immense, white hull that’s risen along the ports in Liverpool, England isn’t a groovy new ocean liner.  It’s the Museum of Liverpool, a building designed by Danish architecture office 3XN that will open in July.  The canted walls of this gently twisted structure are clad with triangulated stone tiles that give it a rich, scale-like texture.  It opens up at the bottom into pedestrian ramps and stairs, and houses a swirling, central staircase that will pull visitors inside and through exhibits that highlight the city’s unique cultural history.  Liverpool is most famous as a way station.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was one of the world’s major ports, a crucial hub for colonial shipping routes, the slave trade, and European emigration.  Then in the twentieth century the city became famous for cultural exports like The Beatles and, later, New Wave acts like Big in Japan, OMD, and Echo and the Bunnymen.  Two enormous, Cyclops-style windows at each end of the museum speak to the city’s unique history.  The north one looks into Liverpool’s city center, and the south one looks out into the world.

The novelist Don DeLillo, one of my literary heroes, has said: “What the words look like is important.  What the words look like in combination.  I have to see the words."  For most writers now words aren’t physical things but apparitions on a screen and the act of writing is entirely bodiless.  What of this world, long-gone, when words were real things and writers saw them and grappled with them and fought for them?

The Valentine by Olivetti, a portable typewriter from 1969, gets at the tactility of words and the act of writing.  A classic, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King, it has the brisk, efficient appeal of a machine and also a whiff of high-technology about it although it isn’t even electrified.  The curved red plastic body evokes a sensual love while its name suggests a more lighthearted attachment.  Can we love words the same way without seeing their physicality, their weight, their character?

We know how to get to Carnegie Hall, but do we know how to get to a Carnegie library?  For those of living in a North American city it’s pretty easy.  At the turn of the century, in order to help those who wanted to help themselves, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated money for the construction of public libraries to cities throughout the world.  In 1901 he made a one-time pledge of over five million dollars to the New York City libraries, funding 66 branch libraries (so-called Carnegie libraries), of which 60 remain.

Carnegie didn’t specify what the libraries should look like but his preferences were well-known: grand entrance staircases, central librarians’ desks, and open stacks.  My own local is a Carnegie Library, as is the library in the town where I’m stationed now.  They’re both typical designs, with heavy, symmetrical, stone facades that scream institutional authority.  The library here looks like police station, and others look like churches, train stations and mausoleums.  Yet each one I’ve seen, though battered by rounds of renovations, has survived with its spirit intact.  The buildings are focused about bright central spaces with open stacks that invite silence, study, wandering, and an enchantment with books.