Delta Land

by Maude Schuyler Clay

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 mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations. “Moving back in 1987 to the Delta (Tallahatchie County), where I am the fifth generation to live here, allowed me to view the endemic and ordinary landscape as a disappearing way of life. With this work, begun in 1993, I feel I have completed an artistic and educational body of photographs that show the landscape and culture of this particular place; that I have preserved through photography the communities of both whites and African Americans of the Delta region.” In an introductory essay that populates Clay's almost people-less settings, Lewis Nordan tells how these photographs evoke his Delta boyhood. Like her images, his memories are in black-and-white, “the color of grief and all its metaphors.” As he recalls the scrappy farms and flaking towns swallowed by the vast flatlands, he writes of his mother's maverick dog and its need of a country home. In Clay's terrains, Nordan sees the Delta land that is at once memorable, familiar, and astonishing.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1999

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

I have owned this book since its appearance, and my signed copy is among my dearest treasures. Although, I must say, that on the night of Emmett Till's funeral, the photographs in DELTA LAND tug at my heart more painfully than ever before, since he is not only the monograph's dedicatee but also, it was in Clay's hometown of Sumner, Mississippi, that his infamous trial took place.

Clay's first cousin is mythic Memphian photographer William Eggleston, and she has long shared his preference for color photography. But that changed when a West Virginia doctor moved to the small Mississippi town of Sumner, where Clay presently lives and where five generations of her family have farmed the land.

"For the walls of his new clinic," she says of the physician, "he wanted photographs that captured the 'stark and elegiac beauty' of the local landscape. And he wanted them to be made in black and white." Clay initially feared that the subject had been overworked, but research showed that both black-and-white and color photographers had concentrated more on portraiture than landscape. The Delta's landscape is now mostly unpeopled: Machines work its hundreds of thousands of acres, and scattered wooden skeletons stand in place of the "big houses," commissaries, outbuildings, tenant dwellings, and churches that used to flourish only decades ago. Clay's photographs both document and transform "the most Southern place on earth," resulting in work that is at once austere and masterful.

n.b. It is now 24 September 2011, and Troy Anthony Davis, despite worldwide protest and the backing of Amnesty International, has been legally executed by the state of Georgia. Someone else described the act as a "legal lynching." Thus I had reason to take Clay's book from the shelves once again; and Till's ghost seems to glow from within each photograph; furthermore, that of Davis--who, moments before he was killed, asked that his executors, and the members of the family of the slain off-duty policeman he was convicted of shooting, despite the recantation or change in the testimony of seven of the nine original witnesses for the prosecution, receive God's mercy--has now, in my mind and heart's eye, joined him. Not enough has changed, especially in the part of the country that Clay and I call home.

[Dayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been said that the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. This evokes a hearty laugh or two. But Maude Schuyler Clay's Delta, this land of her black and white photograph collection, bears little humor at all.

Clay, the contributing photographer for The Oxford American (the nearly defunct glossy southern literary magazine) is a Sumner County, Mississippi, native. Back to the Delta to live and work after a decade in New York City, Clay combines landscapes, or the Delta flatscape, with the stark loneliness of the occasional roadside dog. Few humans don the pages of Delta Land.

Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan, a Delta native himself, writes a provocative and interpretive introduction to the book, one that is witty and piercing in its critical and story-like style.

The book's sepia-toned landscapes show the one constant in a region dominated for millennia by the mighty Mississippi River. That constant is erosion. Many of the photos recall decay and loss. Such is the depiction of the Tallahatchie Bridge of Billy Joe McAllister's jump to the depths below.

This coffee table book, a collection of minimalist and postmodern art, promises to deliver a true, honest, dispassionate and yet emphatic view of the Delta for all who read its words and view its pictorial depictions. The book, not far removed from the documentary eye of Walker Evans, is about memory and the hard, melancholic road that memory often takes us. I recommend it for all who love or long for the land it memorializes.

--Dayne Sherman, author of Welcome to the Fallen Paradise and Zion: A Novel (coming soon)