Steidl This Beautiful World

There is nothing Maude Schuyler Clay likes more than driving around her native Mississippi Delta, especially in the late afternoon light, looking for photographs. This book contains a selection of the serendipitous scenes of town and country Clay recorded on her travels, among still lifes and portraits—the three genres she recalls being taught at art school as “acceptable” to pursue. After photographing with a medium-format camera for 35 years, Clay shifted to digital in 2008, giving her a flexibility to focus less on individual motifs and more on the stories that sequences of them tell. Regardless of her subject, Clay’s focus is the slow, constant processes of change rolling forward in her community and landscape. At times humorous and poignant, realist and allegorical, her work admits disparity and darkness yet chooses hope: this world is, despite all, beautiful.