Biography
Maude Schuyler Clay was born in Greenwood, Mississippi. After attending the University of Mississippi and the Memphis Academy of Arts, she assisted the photographer William Eggleston. She moved to New York City and worked at LIGHT Gallery and then as a photography editor and photographer for Esquire, Fortune, Vanity Fair, and other publications. When she returned to live in the Mississippi Delta in 1987, she continued her color portrait work, for which she received the Mississippi Arts and Letters award for photography in 1988, and again in 1992. In 1993, she began a series of black and white photographs of the Delta landscape. She received the Mississippi Art Commission's Individual Artist Grant in 1998. The University Press of Mississippi published her widely recognized monograph DELTA LAND in 1999, which received the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award in 2000. She was the Photography Editor of the literary magazine The Oxford American from 1998-2002. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, and the Mississippi Museum of Arts, among many others. Her upcoming book of color portraits will be published by Twin Palms Press. She continues to live in the Delta with her husband and three children.

Artist Statement
I started working on the color portrait series when I got my first Rolleiflex 2 1/4 camera in 1975. Thus began "The Mississipians," which evolved into "Low Light," which I am now calling "Her Circle." In all the varied incarnations of this project, I have been inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, who worked from 1864 until her death in 1879. [Clive Bell, writer and nephew of Virginia Woolf, once said of Mrs. Cameron, "Never, I think, did she fall into the vulgar error of supposing what the average man sees is all there is to be seen."] For one of my portraits to be successful, I must have the implicit "permission" of my subject(s). My pictures are as much about the relationship we forge, often in a very short time, as they are about the calm order I strive for in form and content. I prefer to take photographs in the natural low light of early morning or late afternoon, "in the gloaming," as the Scots called it -- the last rays of eery, orangy light that blanket the evening before the sun disappears for the night. I use stark black and white for my landscape photographs . In that work, it is my intention to record the Mississippi Delta.