Maude Schuyler Clay, a photographer and native of the Mississippi Delta, shares her feelings about Miss Welty.
Eudora Welty with Annie Leibovitz
Eudora Welty represents a little bit of everything I have ever aspired to. She was a wonderful photographer, capturing the Mississippi of 1930 WPA days, giving us as complete an image of our culture and our state as anyone ever has; in her writing she was probably the one person who best encapsulated, through her impeccable ear for the vernacular and her vast understanding of the human condition, in equal measure the tragedies and comedies of our Southern and universal existence. Throughout her long life she had an association with, as well as the hard-earned respect of, just about every writer in the last half century or more:
As for clear, honest intent of purpose, that of setting a scene and unfolding a great story, there is no better person than Miss Welty to describe what she was up to:
“I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken – and to know a truth, and I also had to recognize a lie.”
Though as a child I had had a Kodak Brownie camera and then later graduated to a Kodak Instamatic camera, I have to say that I did not began seriously taking photographs until I was about 19 years old. My parents invested in a Pentax SLR 35mm when I left Ole Miss after one year and enrolled at the alluring and exotic Instituto Allende in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. I really don’t know why my mother and father agreed not only to let me go that far away from home, but to actually leave college. Perhaps they were so tired of arguing with me about what I perceived as the parochial nature of life in Oxford, Miss., that they officially sanctioned – by paying the travel and tuition expenses — my “running away”, as I regularly threatened to do, to an art school in Mexico. There, along with my classes in welding, pottery and the art of lost wax jewelry making, I took a photography class that pretty much changed my life. There was something magical about going out onto the streets of San Miguel in the blinding light of day and then returning to the (literally) “dark room” to process and print the pictures. I simply fell in love with photography. As our Miss Welty said of her character, the one she has said she most identified with, Miss Eckhart in “June Recital” from The Golden Apples:
“She derived from what I already knew for myself . . . passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to a risk . . . the love of your art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left.”
Lofty ideals, but I would have to say that I decided in Mexico that I had a mission and that was to somehow keep a record of my world and hope that perhaps this work would someday ring true to others.
After a couple of years at the Memphis Academy of Arts where I was also lucky enough to be able to moonlight as “apprentice” to my cousin William Eggleston (“apprentice” loosely translated as occasional darkroom lackey, but the position mostly consisted of driving round in a 1962 Bonneville in the late afternoon light of Memphis and environs, taking pictures with Bill while listening to Bach on a reel to reel tape recorder he somehow hooked up through the car radio), I moved to New York City.
For a lot of years I was mostly working on the color portraits that Patti Carr Black, then director of the Old Capitol Museum, put in my first one-person show, “The Mississippians”. However, I don’t think I found a subject that really rang true to others until about twenty years later, after I had moved back to Mississippi, and taken a look at the world right in front of my eyes — the one I had grown up in, spent countless hours driving around in, the place I had read about and had heard so many stories which devolved around – the Mississippi Delta landscape. This black and white landscape work became the book, Delta Land, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1999.
It is a place that continues to inspire me. Being a resident of the Delta, this last time since 1987, has given me the great advantage of being an insider, and I try hard not to let the stark beauty become so familiar that it no longer fascinates and captivates me enough to be compelled to photograph it. I believe this quote from Miss Welty could have been written for me:
“A better and less ignorant photographer would certainly have come up with better pictures, but not these pictures; for he could hardly have been as well positioned as I was, moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly because I was a part of it , born into it, taken for granted.”
She photographed like she wrote: straight from the heart and her truest mind, and she combined these with a very strong sense of place. She has been and continues to be an inspiration for me. -Maude Schuyler Clay
Eudora Welty with photographer Bruce Weber
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All photos of Miss Welty are by Maude Schuyler Clay. You can view more of her work here: www.maudeclay.com & The Fifty States Project.
If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.
Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty
Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series
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