This Beautiful World

Subdued yet poignant, Clay’s images of the Mississippi landscape embrace the beauty of change

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. After photographing with a medium-format camera for 35 years, Clay shifted to digital in 2008, giving her a flexibility to focus less on individual motifs and more on the stories that sequences of them tell.
Regardless of her subject, Clay’s focus is the slow, constant processes of change rolling forward in her community and landscape. At once humorous and poignant, realist and allegorical, her work admits disparity and darkness yet chooses hope: this world is, despite all, beautiful.
Maude Schuyler Clay (born 1953) was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, where she continues to live and work. After assisting William Eggleston in Memphis, she moved to New York City and later became a photo editor at Vanity Fair, Esquire and Fortune. Her books include Delta Land (1999), Delta Dogs (2014) and Mississippi History (2015) with Steidl.