PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.75 x 14.5 in. / 132 pgs / 110 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 12/29/2015
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 107

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869309743 TRADE
List Price: $75.00 CAD $99.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

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STEIDL

Maude Schuyler Clay: Mississippi History

Foreword by Richard Ford.

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.

Featured image, "Bill with Gun," is reproduced from Maude Schuyler Clay: Mississippi History.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

The New Yorker

Richard Ford

The photographs in “Mississippi History” feel extraordinarily intimate... Informality, familiarity, and candor are transformed by this authority and persistence and deftness into an aesthetic quotient. And these qualities spell out, as well, the work’s moral position: that to see humans more closely, more discerningly, is life-affirming and good.

Photo District News

Holly Stuart Hughes

Though the images were made over the span of 25 years, each one appears timeless... The “history” told in Mississippi History is a personal one, looking back on the people and way of life that drew Clay back home time and again.

American Suburb X

Schuyler Clay looks at her subjects with a loving gaze. And she is at her absolute best when she catches the warm sunlight piercing through the window lighting her subjects. In such instances the faces of her loved ones are dappled in a beautiful golden glow and thrown into sharp relief against a background of deep but warm shadows.

Photo-Eye Blog

George Slade

I am drawn to this work. Then, compelled to apologize and retreat, as though I’ve mistakenly entered a room where people are making love, fighting, or fading from life. It’s a thorny battle I fight, and that barb remains in place.

Fraction Magazine

Leo Hsu

Clay has a keen awareness of natural light and color and uses these to transform ordinary moments into evocative stagings.