Maude Schuyler Clay
Maude Schuyler Clay (b. 1953) is a photographer of and about Mississippi. Born in Greenwood, she attended the University of Mississippi and the Memphis Academy of Arts, after which point she assisted for her first cousin and acclaimed color photographer, William Eggleston. Her career brought her to New York, where she worked as a photographer and photo editor at publications like Esquire, Fortune, and Vanity Fair. Clay returned to the Mississippi Delta in 1987 where she continued her color portraiture; later, she would begin working in black-and-white for a series about the Delta landscape. She is the author of the award-winning photobook, Delta Land, published in 1999. Her work lives in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); and the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), among others. Clay has been honored for her photography with a Mississippi Art Commission’s Individual Artist Grant.