Oraien Catledge, a Mississippian born in 1928, was entirely self-taught as a photographer and came to his vocation near the end of his career as an advocate for the blind. His black-and-white photographs---mostly portraits---take as their subjects the working poor. These are singularly arresting images---celebratory and inquiring of the human condition and tolerant without resorting to staginess, sentimentality, or sociological intrusiveness. At heart, Catledge's photographs strike a balance between documentary and artistic impulses.

Catledge's photographs happen to be "southern" in their locales and inhabitants, focused often on Atlanta's Cabbagetown slum, and on Mississippi and Louisiana. But as with the best work of any artist, the photographs do not dote on the regional, reaffirm convention, or rest comfortably in known character types.

His gritty, everyman subject matter and direct approach recall the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White, photographers who documented the people and hardships of the Great Depression across America. His memories of the hardscrabble Mississippi Delta, another distinctly southern area beset with poverty, furnished him with the understanding and sympathy to engage his subjects without exploitation or judgment. With the publication of "Oraien Catledge: Photographs," he joins the ranks of great photographers with Mississippi roots, such as Eudora Welty, William Eggleston, and Birney Imes, who have made enduring contributions to the history of American photography.