I met Maude and Langdon Clay in 2016 when SxSE took a photography workshop group to Oxford, Mississippi for the Eggleston Symposium and Exhibition. I had not planned to meet Maudie and Langdon that weekend. But an unfortunate situation involving a backed up septic system in a house full of photographers hungry for dinner found me calling on her to ask if perhaps she knew a reliable roto-rooter guy who worked weekends. When she learned the details of my situation she didn’t hesitate to say, “Oh, just bring ‘em over here! We’ll toss something on the grill, and it sounds like you all could use a drink”. A child of the South, she is. We couldn’t get in the cars fast enough. And to their lovely home we went, the all of us. Where they nourished us with fine food and plied us with enough wine to make us forget about the house we had to go back to. Langdon broke out the projector while the 12 of us settled in around the dining room table for a fabulous after-dinner slide show of their work throughout the years. Needless to say, the Clay’s hospitality became what the photographers remembered most about the weekend.
As photographers, Maude, Langdon, and now their daughter Sophia see the South with eyes many of us wish we had. I have thought that there is no way they have not lived here before – they intuitively know it too well for this to be the first go-round. We are lucky to have them. And I hope you’ll enjoy their exhibition at The DoGood Fund – and these three interviews – as much as I have.
-Editor
5Q with Maude, Langdon, and Sophia Clay
Hitt Chapel ©Maude Schuyler Clay
Maude Schuyler Clay 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, worked at the Light Gallery, and was later a photo editor at Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Fortune. Clay returned to live in the Delta in 1987 and was photography editor of the Oxford American magazine from 1999 to 2004. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Moden Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Clay’s books include Delta Land (1999), Delta Dogs (2014), and Mississippi History (2015) with Steidl. Upcoming from Steidl will be This Beautiful World (2025).
Nancy McCrary: As Southerners, we can usually identify a photograph as being “southern” from 50 paces. The land, the architecture, the subject matter is as familiar as our own face sometimes. Going forward, what will become the iconic image in Southern Photography of the 21st century?
Maude Schuyler Clay: I have to admit I have no idea. The things you mention – the land, the architecture, and the subject matter, have been and remain important for me and many others who have worked in the south (and elsewhere.) I will be long gone before the end of the 21st century, but I have to believe (hope?) there will still be people – not A.I. robots – who are trying to keep a record of things. The term “Southern” photography has always been a bit of a quagmire for me, but I continue photographing mainly in the south, specifically in the Mississippi Delta. My aim for a long time has been to simply leave a record of how it looks here. To achieve that end, I think of myself as more of a purist, and I prefer so-called “straight photography,” i.e. no cropping, no fussing around with negatives or narratives. On the other hand, you have your wild cards like Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and more recently Tommy Kha, who have specifically set out to alter reality. I say if it works for them, that’s fine. These, too, are important records of the world, specifically their version of the south and all its haunting contradictions. Photography can do so many things and there are so many different ways to go about it.
NM: We’ve watched photography change dramatically in the last 25 years. From film to digital, print to screen, galleries going online, etc. What are the positives and negatives to all of this in your opinion?
MSC: I have lived long enough to have done both – film more extensively because that was all there was when I started taking photographs as a kid with my Brownie Starflash, an Instamatic, and graduating to a Pentax 35mm SLR. I first fell in love with black and white, then color, and I went back and forth a few times, eventually settling on color. There are pros and cons to each. One of the things that I miss about having negatives and contacts and prints to refer to is their sheer tactile nature. I mean I love handling the work versus sitting behind a computer to see and edit what you have done. I was never a huge darkroom freak, say, like Sally Mann, who truly enjoys and so beautifully reaps the magic of the darkroom, but for me there was a certain solace that came with being in a darkroom. You were in your own little (darkened) world and besides developing film or making prints, about all you could do in there was listen to music or the radio or talk on a land line. I even learned how to make color prints but ultimately preferred to farm them out to those with better darkroom skills (think Anthony Accardi at Green Rhino in NYC.) I see my old C-prints – now beautifully faded, which gives them a patina of time passing, and I can get nostalgic, but given the instability of earlier color photography’s chemistry, I assume one day those will fade away entirely. Also, I really miss the yellow Kodak boxes! Digital is where the world has headed, and I have gotten used to the speed and ease of it. I started doing digital around 2010 or so, first with a Canon and now I am using a Leica. Langdon is a great tech person, and he makes exquisitely beautiful prints on his big Hewlett Packard printer from my scanned 2 1/4 negatives (taken with Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex on Kodacolor 400 and later Portra film.) Of course, now that I am shooting mostly digital, these big prints are made from digital images (Advice: always shoot in raw if you want to make larger prints from digital images). Photographic technology really has come a long way, and they say current color prints will last a hundred years or more. I do believe the human element still plays a big part in the making of photographs, even if a lot of it is ultimately done on a computer.
NM: I want to know your favorite Instagram accounts – 5, 10, 20, pick a number.
MSC: I, like most people who will admit it, do enjoy Instagram (too many ads now, but still…) The posts I enjoy are mostly photographers that I know or would like to know. It’s a good way to keep up with them and their work, with the occasional lagniappe of the personal: seeing children and pets and travels. I try to keep my politics off Instagram, but Facebook is another animal. If in the near future I get “disappeared” in this troubled political world that we have found ourselves in, it will be for a reason: speaking out against what I perceive as profoundly myopic policies that will ultimately cause more harm to this country than good. We have one planet, and we need to preserve it and try to live harmoniously within it. But I digress. I do like and use both Instagram and Facebook, though both have their larger problems.
NM: We all know you are closely related to Southern Photographic Royalty, William Eggleston. We stand in awe. What is something you learned explicitly from him or his work?
MSC: My mother (1918-1988) and Bill’s mother (1912-1995) were sisters who grew up in the house their parents built around 1911. I also grew up here on Cassidy Bayou in Sumner in the Mississippi Delta, and now live in that same house, which I jokingly call “Grey Gardens South.” After leaving The University of Mississippi, and going to San Miguel’s Instituto Allende in Mexico for a little while, I came back to Memphis to go the Memphis Academy of Arts, and I was Bill’s “assistant.” That’s in quotes because while I did do some darkroom work for him, he mostly showed me what few photo books there were then – I remember Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, Lee Friedlander’s Self Portrait, and Diane Arbus, James Van Der Zee – and hundreds if not thousands of his own prints. Mainly being his assistant meant we would just drive around in Memphis and environs, including Mississippi, in the late afternoon light. I observed what Bill and the occasional famous photographer friends of his – Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Tod Papageorge, Stephen Shore, all men! – who came to visit him in Memphis, were taking pictures of. Bill always said he was photographing “democratically,” (I.e. everything had equal weight – from a building to a tree to piece of trash or a sign.) That covered a lot of ground, and most of my early work was a mere imitation of his. However, in the late-70’s, mainly to differentiate my photographs from his since he didn’t concentrate specifically on people as a subject, I started taking my color portraits with an old Rolleiflex 2 ¼. It took me about thirty years, but this work eventually evolved into the MISSISSIPPI HISTORY project and ultimately the book of that name that was published in 2015 by Steidl. In between all that, I had some mild “success” with a book of black and white landscapes published in 1999 called DELTA LAND and a “sequel” called DELTA DOGS. I had moved back to Mississippi after years of living in NYC, where I met Langdon, and we subsequently had three kids that we raised here. For quite a while, I was a mother driving kids to school, etc., and being a photographer on the side.
NM: I think we had it so much easier than the emerging photographers of today. Do you have any wisdom to share with them for encouragement, or advice for success? Also, how do you define success?
MSC: Keep doing the work. Other than that, I have no advice. It’s all about passion, perseverance, and luck. As far as I have been able to tell, there is no real formula. Success to me is figuring out what you want to do and taking that wherever it leads you. In my case it was photography, which I was lucky to discover early on. If the definition of success nowadays is about how much money you make, you really shouldn’t count on that! Just keep doing the work. Oh, and always carry your camera with you. Everywhere. The last thing you want to do as a photographer is talk about “the one that got away” because you didn’t have your camera with you. It really is true that “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
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Hitt Chapel ©Langdon Clay
Langdon Clay was born in New York City in 1949, raised in New Jersey and Vermont, and attended school in New Hampshire and Boston. Clay moved to New York in 1971 and spent the next 16 years photographing there, throughout the United States, and in Europe for various magazines and books. In 1987 he moved to Mississippi where he has since lived, worked, and raised three children with his wife, photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. Clay’s work is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France in Paris. Steidl published Clay’s Cars, New York City, 1974-1976 in 2016. Upcoming books from Steidl are Tuesday’s Just As Bad, and 42nd Street 1979, 2011, 2023.
Nancy McCrary: As Southerners, we can usually identify a photograph as being “southern” from 50 paces. The land, the architecture, the subject matter is as familiar as our own face sometimes. Going forward, what will become the iconic image in Southern Photography of the 21st century?
Langdon Clay: The truth of it is that, though I’ve lived in Mississippi for 38 years, I am still a (damn) yankee. Both my parents hail from Philadelphia, I was born in New York City, lived in New Jersey until I was 10, moved to Vermont and went to school in New England.
I met Maudie in New York City in my 20’s but I am really a child of the Viet Nam era sixties. A world that Spiro Agnew (Nixon’s vice-president) derided for its effete intellectual snobbery. Coming from this background I was more than primed and ready for some other world.
Southern gothic (?) was that world with its soft humid heat, tangy blues music, and slow-talking people you couldn’t always understand. My passport to this foreign land came with marriage and I’m still here after raising three kids. Albeit as a more jaded and cynical self than the wide-eyed guy of my early 30’s.
The photography of the south I knew in high school was from James Agee’s exploration of Alabama sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a collaboration with Walker Evans. From there the work of all the Farm Security Administration’s photographers and painters became, and still are to some extent, the images that scream the South. In time these notions were updated by William Christenberry and Bill Eggleston. The South of today looks more like the rest of the country than ever before. The charming eccentric qualities of yesteryear are fast disappearing all over. Here in the Mississippi Delta we are in a sort of race to get it on film the way Eugene Atget recorded small neighborhoods in Paris 100 years ago ahead of Haussmann’s massive boulevard anchored masterplan.
NM: We’ve watched photography change dramatically in the last 25 years. From film to digital, print to screen, galleries going online, etc. What are the positives and negatives to all of this in your opinion.
LC: I don’t know if the basics of photographic communication have changed. We still yearn for elements of the specific in an image to apply universally in some subjectively uplifting way. Which is a fancy way of saying viewers still bring their own baggage to and “read in” the interpretation of any given image or arrangement of images.
Certainly, some of the delivery systems and the fact that everyone has a camera in their phone, the speed with which dissemination of images is possible on the internet, and the ease with which a photograph may be altered or made up from whole text, so to speak, is distinctly different.
Take a then and now example from Vivian Maier. Mostly unknown in her lifetime, rather fantastically discovered at a storage space auction, she often took pictures with a semi-imposing Rolleiflex not a diminutive Leica. She clearly understood how to balance elements in a square format image and with great skill and delight revealed near and far space in cascading layers, especially in self-portraits. But the real secret to her success was an element of surprise. With a weirdly aggressive timidity she could sneak up and get her shot before you realized she was even there or that you had been her subject. In our current CCTV selfie era where everyone is constantly either photographing or being photographed that moment of surprise would be nearly impossible to achieve.
Yes, much has changed in how photographs are such a big part of our daily lives, but what makes a photograph, or collections of them, stand out and beg for your attention probably hasn’t changed that much. Seeing more color work might still be the biggest change of all for me.
The one thing that seems to be different from when I started in 1968 is the eco-verse of photo schools and galleries out there. Worldwide. In the early 70’s in New York there was just Tennyson Schad’s Light Gallery. However small it was we lucky ones were still able, as newbies, to rub elbows with some of the greats: Kertesz, Brassai, Callahan, Friedlander, Winogrand, Shore. The impressive list goes on and on.
People seem to hunger for movement — in TikTok gyrations, in Instagram reels, in YouTube videos, even at the side of some google search is always somebody yammering away. Call me old-fashioned but I still take great pleasure in contemplating what is in- or just outside of -a simple two-dimensional frame. A clue to the lives we lead.
NM: I want to know your favorite Instagram accounts – 5, 10, 20, pick a number.
LC: I started Instagram in 2015. It was just photos and kind of fun. You could put silly things that you wouldn’t ordinarily have a use for and caption it with something cryptic or quirky. After you got a little audience, you started to devote a portion of your day to feeding the piranhas. A self-imposed pressure. You thought it meant something. Perfect for the pandemic. Then the ads came, then movie reels, then sound. All driven by something I still don’t really understand: influencers. It turned into the social media goopy taffy that it is now.
At heart for me the real problem is that a phone screen is just too damn little to communicate much. I’d prefer if you could do it on a desktop. So now in my current curmudgeon mode I don’t spend a lot of daily time on it. I confess and admit there are times when I am hunched over like everyone else scrolling down some Instagram rabbit hole. Not for validation, just for fun.
The sites I do seek out are mostly living or dead photographers. Or people I know or would like to know. Mark Peterson, Mitch Epstein, Lynn Saville, Steidl, Jackson Fine Art, Photographers Photographed, and so many more. Pick your favorites. Curiously some of my favorites are the woodworking sites where something is built in a 30 second time lapse. I live in an old house with deferred maintenance and dream that things would repair themselves that fast.
NM: We all know you are closely related to Southern Photographic Royalty, William Eggleston. We stand in awe. What is something you learned explicitly from him or his work?
LC: I met Bill in 1970, on my way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans to be a gopher on the (as yet unmade) film of “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy. It wasn’t until six years later at social events surrounding the 1976 MOMA show John Szarkowski curated of Eggleston’s sprawling Southern work that I met Maudie.
That show I think is still considered to be the moment in the American art world that color photography began to become what it is today. It had a rough start, as the initial reviews were terrible, because reviewers were mired in their fascination with the serious artiness of the depression era and the authentic street worthiness of Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment and all that the Magnum Agency stood for. As they say— all that is history now.
He showed that anything and everything is worth pointing a camera at. That life is not a scavenger hunt, it’s much more random than that and wandering around with a camera is a fine way to get through the day and apparently get through your life. One day at a time.
The problem is if you take up his mantle everything you do will look like his.
So, from 1976 forward the big dilemma, for many of us, was how to honor his spirit of approaching anything and everything equally without becoming an out and out imitator. Happily, his is not the only way to see the world.
NM: I think we had it so much easier than the emerging photographers of today. Do you have any wisdom to share with them for encouragement, or advice for success? Also, how do you define success?
LC: The standard catchphrases older people cite to their younger selves or succeeding generations are: “Stay the course.”, or “Slow and steady”. When asked by her children as she cooked supper what we’d be having for dessert my mother’s winking Victorian-sounding answer was “Wait and see pudding … with patience sauce”.
All of these would apply naturally if your goal is finding a photographic audience. Time is certainly important, but another more mysterious element in the periodic table of life is luck. In a world oozing with talent luck puts an outsized thumb on the scale. Sticktoitiveness can yield its own luck. So don’t stop doing what you love and maybe the world will see it your way one day.
The world of photography encompasses many and varied disciplines. You’re not restricted to just one at a time, there are plenty of crossovers. But if you’re talking about art, or the capitol “A” Art World, and photography it is a very small niche and most of the real world races on by and cares not a whit about it.
So, for me, after 57 years of trying, success is getting up and finding things in front of me so interesting that I still want to photograph them.
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Hitt Chapel ©Sophia Clay
Sophia Clay (b. 1994) is a photographer from the Mississippi Delta, living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work centers around the temporality of the manmade within the natural, often focusing on how the natural world reclaims a space. She finds a particular beauty in ordinary or mundane objects. Her work has been exhibited at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi.
Disclaimer These interview questions were answered under the fog of Covid – SC
Nancy McCrary: We’ve watched photography change dramatically in the last 25 years. From film to digital, print to screen, galleries going online, etc. What are the positives and negatives to all of this in your opinion?
Sophia Clay: My entire existence in photography has been in the age of digital. I remember when Instagram was a fun new app in high school to add filters to your photos! The progression to what it has become today is somewhat harrowing in that every “like” or “comment” contributes to data collection and how you will be marketed to. Even so, the access it has given to photographers to share their work is remarkable (I sheepishly admit that I am terrible at posting regularly and marketing myself, however, I admire those that do).
I think a lot of photographers who grew up with ever-advancing technology are migrating back to film. It gives me an opportunity to be more intentional in my work. My Pentax 6×4.5 is no small piece of equipment so it’s not my everyday camera, but I do feel that it allows me to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
My dad develops most of my film in the once-closet-now-darkroom in the house that I was the fourth generation to grow up in. If only I could make the scanning process more appealing!
NM: I want to know your favorite Instagram accounts – 5, 10, 20, pick a number.
SC:
@photographersphotographed Photographer Photographed
@rootedinms Rooted Magazine
@ogdenmuseum Ogden Museum of Southern Art
@thedogoodfund The Do Good Fund
@steidlverlag Steidl Publishers
@maryellenmarkfoundation Mary Ellen Mark Foundation
@cosmopsis Ashley Gates
@maudeclay Maude Schuyler Clay
@langclay Langdon Clay
@brandon.content Brandon Holland
@acdilworth Alexa Dilworth
@houstoncofield Houston Cofield
@walkerbankson Walker Bankson
@ce_joiner Casey Joiner
@ablountphotography Anne Blount
@mitch_epstein Mitch Epstein
@anasamoylova Anastasia Samoylova
@cigharvey Cig Harvey
@jackieleeyoung Jackie Lee Young
NM: We all know you are closely related to Southern Photographic Royalty, William Eggleston. We stand in awe. What is something you learned explicitly from him or his work?
SC: Cousin Bill and Rosa’s house was my favorite to visit in Memphis as a kid, long before I understood his impact on the photography world. There is no doubt in my mind that his style has influenced my mother, my father, and now my work.
A couple of years ago I was speaking with Winston, Bill’s son, and expressing my fear and doubt of taking on fine art photography because of the comparison to my parents that would come with it. His encouragement helped me realize just how exceptional our relationship in this realm is, and in turn, is really what the In Threes show is about. We each have our own style yet there is a thread of continuity that comes from our shared experiences and our love of color and late afternoon light.
NM: I think we had it so much easier than the emerging photographers of today. Do you have any wisdom to share with them for encouragement, or advice for success? Also, how do you define success?
SC: My version of success lives in connection. There is an incredible and supportive community of photographers in New Orleans! I’ve had the privilege to work with the New Orleans Photo Alliance and PhotoNOLA Festival, both of which create a space for photographers to come together, learn from each other, and share their work. I highly suggest participating in the PhotoNOLA portfolio review – at any given point, you are surrounded by 100+ photographers, curators, publishers, editors, and gallerists who are willing to network and share guidance on bringing your work to a larger audience.
In Threes: Photography of Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, and Sophia Clay
The DoGood Fund Gallery
Columbus, Georgia
August 28 – November 1, 2025
The DoGood Fund is pleased to announce the opening of In Threes: Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, and Sophia Clay. This exhibition presents the intertwined visions of a married couple – celebrated Southern photographers Maude and Langdon Clay – and their youngest daughter, Sophia, who is forging her own artistic path at age 30. Anchored in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner, the Clay’s collective body of work spans decades, revealing not just a shared craft, but a deeply personal bond. In Threes serves as an intimate vignette of a family of photographers spanning decades. Acting as the first exhibition as a family, the Clay’s work reveals not just a shared craft but a deeply personal bond between the artists.
Please join us for a DoGood Salon on Thursday, October 9, at 6:00 PM featuring the Clay family and curator-photographer Ashley Gates.
