Maude Schuyler Clay

This Beautiful World

There is nothing Maude Schuyler Clay likes more than driving around her native Mississippi Delta, especially in the late afternoon light, looking for photographs. "I like series of photographs," she says of her work. "Getting a group of photographs over time that seem to work together to tell some sort of story. But often I am not completely aware of what that story is until I have amassed quite a few photographs. You might say my main goal is to leave a record of what my world looks like." This Beautiful World contains a selection of the serendipitous scenes of town and country Clay recorded on her travels, among still lifes and portraits.

The foreword is by W. Ralph Eubanks, who wrote A Place Like Mississippi and When It's Darkness on the Delta

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Delta Land

Although many acclaimed photographers have focused their cameras on the Mississippi Delta, no photographer, until now, has attempted to produce a photographic interpretation of the land itself. The images in this book, all taken by Maude Schuyler Clay between 1993 and 1998, are the result of the first such undertaking.

"Delta Land," she says, "is a photographic project which involves the recording and preservation of the Mississippi Delta landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures: mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations.

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Mississippi History

Maude Schuyler Clay started her color portrait series Mississippi History in 1975 when she acquired her first Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex camera. At the time, she was living and working in New York and paying frequent visits to her native Mississippi Delta, whose landscape and people continued to inspire her. Over the next 25 years, the project, which began as The Mississippians, evolved in part as an homage to Julia Margaret Cameron, a definitive pioneer of the art of photography. Cameron lived in Victorian England and began her photographic experiments in 1863. Clay's expressive, allegorical portraits of her friends, family and other Mississippians, as well as her artful approach to capturing the essence of light, are the driving forces behind her recollection of moments of family life in Mississippi in the 1980s and 90s.

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Delta Dogs

The Mississippi Delta is known for many things. It is a land of stark contrast, in which rich soil produces an agricultural bounty as well as fearsome economic want. The Delta has compelled generations of writers, musicians, and artists to chronicle and engage its harsh and mysterious beauty. Seen through the penetrating lens of noted photographer Maude Schuyler Clay, the nearly deserted buildings and landscapes of the Delta are brought to life by the dogs that roam the wide fields and swamp-soaked shadows.

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Mississippi

"The imperishable quiet at the heart of form." This quietness to be found by contemplating the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay was at the heart of Ann Fisher-Wirth's poetic process, which involved listening-listening to the voices that spoke their stories somehow in connection, however oblique, with the photographs. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian; Fisher-Wirth has lived there for 30 years, so the images and words represent long, complicated accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience.

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A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845

The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South's people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. A Long Arc collects 175 years of key moments through over 250 photographs to present a stunning meditation on American identity.

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