Jackson, Miss. ? The black-and-white images contrast the lives of a bygone Mississippi.

Boys with short, cropped hair in dirty overalls. Men sitting away the afternoon in Sunday best, Jitney Jungle stenciled on a grocery store sign across the square. A woman, dressed in a spiritual white, encircled by seven children in a pool of sunlight.

They are among the snapshots captured by a master storyteller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty. An exhibit of her work, “Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty Among Artists of the Thirties,” opened Saturday at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

The 150-piece show includes 50 pieces by Welty, mostly photos but also several watercolors. The author of “The Optimist’s Daughter” and other masterly works about Southern life died last July at age 92.

Welty used location and dress  but most vividly her subjects’ eyes  to tell their hard-edged stories; the faces in her photos often reflect inner strength and triumph despite difficult circumstances.

Welty, through a narrator, talks about the works on an audio guide. “What I respond to now just as I did the first time is not the Depression, not the black, not the South … but the story of her life in her face,” she says about one farm woman’s weathered pose.

In words and pictures

What Welty saw through the viewfinder paralleled what she saw as a writer, said Suzanne Marrs, a family friend and a professor at Jackson’s Millsaps College who specializes in Welty’s literary works.

“Short stories are about moments in which people reveal themselves,” Marrs said. “In that sense, the short stories and the photographs are related to each other.”

In her book, “Eudora Welty Photographs,” the Mississippi native wrote that both habits of observation shaded into the other. “In both cases, writing and photography, you were trying to portray what you saw, and truthfully,” Welty wrote. “And a camera could catch that fleeting moment, which is what a short story, in all its depth, tries to do.”

Richard Ford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who grew up in the same Jackson neighborhood as Welty, cautioned that her photography and writing needed to be viewed and enjoyed apart from each other.

“Neither side fundamentally improves from the comparison,” Ford said in an interview. “The media are so different that comparison risks the diminution of either one.”

Contrasting photos

Welty had two books of photos published  “One Time One Place: Mississippi in the Depression” in 1971, and “Eudora Welty Photographs” in 1989.

Marrs said the “Passionate Observer” exhibit for the first time places Welty’s photos in the context of the 1930s. The exhibit also features photos from the great women photographers of the era  Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange among them.

A display of Farm Securities Administration photos offers a contrast to Welty’s style. Although Welty’s connection with her subjects sets her apart, the FSA shooters show a sharp technical command of composition and contrast that is sometimes lacking in Welty’s photos.

There is also a sampling of Welty photos from the time she spent in New York City. These photos, while sometimes technically stronger than those from Mississippi, are distant and unemotional. Welty was clearly in her element when shooting the black and white grittiness of Southern life.

And that may be the greatest contribution of “Passionate Observer”: It gives you the opportunity to watch the great Eudora Welty connecting viewers to the tough times of the 1930s, when life’s rough edges highlighted the strength of the human spirit.

Rene Paul Barilleaux, who curated the show for the museum, said the optimism and humanity found in Welty’s photos is reassuring.

Marrs agreed.

“You know you’re looking at people who are suffering the times of the Great Depression,” she said. “But you also see a resiliency, that they’re not being defeated.

“That is very uplifting.”

“Passionate Observer” runs until June 30.