CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/4/2016

Maude Schuyler Clay: Mississippi History

"Anna and Schuyler with fireworks" is reproduced from Mississippi History, Maude Schuyler Clay's quietly powerful portrait collection. "Clay's photographs are especially human—in their subject matter, and in the photographer's insistence that we be moved by art to look closely, and that photographs are good when they are as complex as we are," Richard Ford writes. "…In the familiar and recognizable, in our received notions of history, in our firmly held beliefs about what place means, and in our willingness to consider even the familiar as artifice, there is, as Maude Clay's work makes clear and beautiful and immensely pleasurable, more than we know but not more than we would like to know. These magical photographs bring news of that complicatedness in us all. If in some sublime way they leave the viewer slightly perturbed—as they do me—it is a small price we are lucky to pay."