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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Reviews
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. -- Holly Stuart Hughes -- Photo District News
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. -- Richard Ford -- The New Yorker
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. -- American Suburb X
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. -- George Slade -- Photo-Eye Blog
Clay has a keen awareness of natural light and color and uses these to transform ordinary moments into evocative stagings. -- Leo Hsu -- Fraction Magazine