A Record of the World as She Sees It
I could see Maude Schuyler Clay in the narrow front hallway of the University of Mississippi Museum. She was embracing friends who had come to the opening reception of the joint photography exhibit with her husband. Maude wore a paisley wrap that flowed to where the hem of her speckled dress met with her tall coffee-colored boots. Dazzling was the first word that came to mind. But maybe I only thought of her as dazzling because I already knew who she was—an affluent artist, and fifth generation Mississippian, whose 1999 photography book Delta Land was praised by The New York Times for “finding poetry in this slow, languorous countyscape.” Perhaps, though, if I didn’t know who she was and saw Maude out on the street, I might’ve thought she looked a bit like a sophisticated hippy.
“That’s Maude,” I whispered and nudged my roommate, Wesley, who was sipping on a plastic cup of free cabernet. He asked if I wanted to go say hi, and I said, maybe later, because she was already surrounded by an adoring group. I didn’t want Wesley and me to be those knowit-all college students who butt our way into places where we probably don’t belong. Besides, I already knew Maude. Well, sort of. About a year earlier, I had written a review of the book, titled Mississippi, that she made with poet and UM professor Ann Fisher-Wirth in 2018. I never formally met Maude, but we exchanged some emails about the locations of various photographs, and I sent her a link to the published article. Then, to my surprise, she added me on Facebook. She once commented on a photo of Wesley, another friend and me decked out in green sparkly bows, Irish socks and clove wreaths for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Memphis. Oh, it must be St Paddy’s day. Hated that holiday, she wrote. The NYC gallery I worked in always had an elevator full of green vomit. I thought she would be an interesting subject for a profile, so I emailed her.
Before going to the artist reception, I stood in Wesley’s doorway and asked him if he knew the proper way to pronounce ‘Maude.’ Wesley is from the small town of Raleigh, Mississippi, and I’m from a suburb in northeast Ohio, so I figured he’d be the authority. Wesley jokingly exaggerated his southern accent and drawled the name out, Maaauuude, then said he actually didn’t know how to pronounce it, so we listened to a YouTube video, which informed us the ‘e’ at the end was silent. Great, I thought, now I won’t make a fool of myself when I greet her. But I never did end up greeting her at the reception.
Wesley and I strolled past a photograph of a black woman wearing a maid’s uniform with a frilly lace collar. She crouches on the ground and one of her hands grips a small blonde toddler’s arm. The toddler lies on the ground crying. The woman stares into the lens with her mouth turned down in an exasperated frown. An upholstered chair, a cabinet full of porcelain and a cream-colored wall surround the woman and the toddler in the center of the square photo. Light pours in, presumably from a window, over the woman’s buttoned black blouse and white apron. Emma and Schuyler, Christmas Morning, Sumner, Mississippi, the placard next to the photo read.
“Surely, they didn’t make her wear that . . .?” Wesley paused.
“I hope not . . .” I said. “What year is this from, anyway? It couldn’t have been that long ago . . .”
I looked at the placard but there was no year.
Two weeks later, when I interviewed Maude Schuyler Clay, I discovered that the photo had been taken in the 90s. During the interview, I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Maude on a bench in the Lawrence Gallery of the museum and discovered that Emma McShane had worked as a nanny looking after Maude’s children. Maude said the photo shows the difficulty of balancing motherhood and photography. “This is a story I’ve probably told hundreds of times . . .” Instead of reaching out to help her son when he was crying, Maude’s first instinct was to capture that late afternoon light. “I will always be grateful to have had someone help me care for my kids.” I wanted to ask Maude about the uniform but just nodded along because our interview hadn’t exactly gotten off to the best start . . .
The first question I had asked Maude was, “What was it like growing up in the Delta during the Civil Rights movement?” I guess I felt like I already knew her well enough through online interactions to skip the whole ‘building rapport’ thing. “Talk about a loaded question . . .” Maude had replied. After our interview, she sent me an email with a hyperlink to an article titled“How to Be a Good Interviewer.” In the subject line of the email, she wrote, “Know you know this but good piece I thought.” I clicked on the link and found that the article was about how to interview someone for a job. “Maybe it’s your first time hiring people,” it read. Maude must’ve not even read it. Listening back to the interview recording also made me wonder, why should my question about the Civil Rights movement have been considered “loaded”? I just thought it was a relevant question because her work was described, by a photography magazine, as residing “in that place where personal reflection informs historical document in perfect combination.”
Maude was born in 1953, two years before the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is 45 miles from Sumner, where the trial and acquittal of Till’s murderers occurred. Till was an African American boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi when he was killed by two men for allegedly flirting with a white woman. “I try to explain it to people—not to get a free pass—but, okay, I was two,” Clay said. I laughed. I found it interesting how, by asking about her childhood in tandem with the historical period, Maude was acting like I was indicting her.
When she was growing up, Maude said there were two separate histories. Black history and white history. “Gosh, there was so much that we either didn’t know or weren’t aware of,” Maude said. “Or choose not to find out about.” Maude said her parents weren’t “pro anything,” but they just did not explain what was going on. She said she was “blissfully unaware” for a while and didn’t even find out about Emmett Till until junior high school. “Some teacher happened to drop that bomb.” The way Maude describes Civil Rights era segregation matches the image I’ve cultivated in my head based mainly on photographic records and books. “It was still back in the day when black people had to jump up on the street and tip their caps to white women,” Maude said, which made me think of an anecdote my dad once told me about how when he was a student at Ole Miss in the late 1980s, the black janitors in his dorm called him‘sir.’ Maude said, “It was just the creepiest thing . . . I grew up thinking that was just the way life was.”
Maude’s mother taught her that literature, specifically Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, was sacred. Her parents also took her and her siblings to the ballet and plays. “I think I was a fairly cultured Mississippian, thanks to my parents,” Maude said. Her voice was soft and gentle but with a southern twang. Her father was a Yankee lawyer turned “gentleman farmer” when he moved down south. Maude was the middle child and the family jester who always tried to keep the peace. She refers to her childhood as rather bucolic, a word I often found used to describe her photography and the Delta landscape. I honestly had never heard the word and had to look it up: Bucolic, “relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life.” During January and February, Maude’s family took off for their winter home in Sarasota, Florida, where she attended an alternative middle school called McClellan Park. I Googled the school and found that it’s a 3,000-square-foot wood-frame building constructed in 1916, surrounded by greenery and listed for sale at $1.3 billion. “Growing up as a white person of means in the Delta at the time . . . you just couldn’t get any more fortunate than that,” Maude said, which made me think about something my professor Kiese Laymon, once said. Whenever white, normally older women, at his book readings ask how they can ‘help,’ meaning help black people in America, he says they can’t do anything until they confront the ways that white supremacy tears apart their insides as well.
The first “real” photo that Maude took was at the winter home in Sarasota. The photo was of a set of plastic horse toys in the grass. She said that when she got the roll of film back, she made a mental note, “that’s kind of a good picture—I might like to do this . . .” And she said, of course, she always thought artists were glamorous with their garrets in Paris. “I like to create stuff and get lost in a world of my own.”
Maude was nine years old when she got her first camera and said that she took pictures of all her animals and the people who worked for her family, Lucille and Jasper. “I bothered the hell out of them all the time,” she said and showed me a photo of elderly Lucille and Jasper holding her baby girl Anna. Anna wears a red and green plaid skirt, yellow sweater and ringlet hair. Lucille wears a brown plaid dress, glasses, houndstooth cap and leans on a cane. Lucille’s wallet protrudes from her dress pocket and Jasper wears a button-down white shirt, trousers and MPP CO baseball cap. They stand in front of a shiny red car, blue skies and tree branches. Between two of them, Maude said that Lucille and Jasper worked 59 years for her family. “They were almost like a second set of parents,” Maude said. “And I know that sounds like a total cliché.”
Maude was 15 years old and attending boarding school in Memphis in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Maude said that boarding school was where she learned “to do all the bad stuff, like smoke pot and cigarettes and drink.” Her parents sent Maude away for school because they couldn’t “face the idea of their daughter going to an integrated school.” Despite the close proximity to the Civil Rights movement, Maude said her all-girls school was still so “far removed” because they weren’t allowed to go downtown, “where all the good shopping was,” due to the unrest and people marching on the streets. Maude’s comment about shopping made me think about my own vantage point in history. I grew up in a 96% white suburb near Cleveland, Ohio, and was far removed from the police brutality in the city. I was 18 years old and a senior at a 92% white public school in 2014, when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot in Cleveland. And, according to my curated life on Instagram, on that day, November 22, 2014, I was at a tree lighting ceremony in the Crocker Park shopping mall.
“I do remember being profoundly affected by the fact that they killed Martin Luther King,” Maude said. “It was an echo of what had happened five years earlier when they killed John F. Kennedy.” As I jotted down notes in pink ink, I wondered who Maude meant when she said ‘they.’ “It was just one of those unfathomable things,” she continued. “Like, oh my god, are things really that bad that they have to assassinate people?” She said ‘they’ again, like it was a force of evil that was other to us. “Anyway, that’s my Civil Rights story and it’s not very enlightened,” she finished. I thought her last remark was interesting because in the afterword of Maude’s book Delta Land, she wrote that she “places her work within both Mississippi’s history of exploitation—slavery, agricultural labor, segregation, and the murder of Emmett Till—and within Mississippi’s photographic history—New Deal-era documentarians, civil rights photographers and William Eggleston.” I wonder, what exactly does it mean to ‘place’ your work within a history of exploitation? To place means to put something in a particular position, so, she’s placing her photographs of the Delta, from the 1980s and 1990s, within, or inside, the timeline of exploitation? History means the past, but isn’t exploitation still occurring? One thing is for sure, though, ‘to place’ something does not mean ‘to grapple’ with something. One places a vase of roses on a table, looks at the beauty of the roses and then moves on with their day.
On the first day of the Ole Miss fall semester in 1971, Maude rolled up to campus and registered as a freshman. She hadn’t applied to any schools. “I wish I would’ve cared more about my education,” she said. Much to her mother’s dismay, Maude decided not to join a sorority because she was “some sort of fake radical.” In college, she said she was running around with halter-tops, a shag haircut, smoking pot and lighting incense in her dorm as if she was at Berkeley, and not a university of 7,000 students. “I thought Ole Miss was pretty provincial,” she said. “But I guess I was pretty provincial myself—that’s what I mean by fake radical.” Maude said she doesn’t remember her time at Ole Miss very well because she always wanted to be in any other place. “I think it was a problem of mine, not anything to do with the university,” Maude said. “I don’t even remember what exactly I was rebelling against anymore.” Having her exhibit at the University Museum feels like a “full circle” because she was finally able to accomplish the vision she was trying to forge as a student. “If I could just leave a record of the world as I see it and as I think it is, that’s a start,” Maude said. After graduating with a degree in English, Maude went to the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico, for a few months.“Mommy and daddy agreed to pay for it,” she said.
After returning from Mexico, Maude’s parents were adamant about her continuing school, so she went to the Memphis Academy of Arts, where her cousin, William Eggleston, practiced color photography. Eggleston had an exhibit at the UM museum during my freshman year and had also been featured in artist Randy Hayes’s exhibit my sophomore year. I had written a profile about Hayes and was later invited to visit his home and studio in Holly Springs where we sat in his sunroom, sipping water and chatting about the career path of an art critic, with the implication that I could get on such a path. I like the art scene in Oxford because, obviously, I like art and the free wine and hors d’oeuvres, and because from an anthropological perspective, I’m infatuated with the crowd I perceive as the trendy and bohemian artistic elite. Going to art shows makes me feel fancy, mature and different from other students. And I imagine my life after college might be similar to the lives of these local artists. I also find it interesting that the arts seem to be mostly supported by wealthy donors.
At Randy Hayes’s reception, the museum director called out all the names of the donors and even had significant contributors raise their hands and step forward. My boyfriend and I exchanged glances and later mocked the recognition as gold stars for adults. This made me wonder though, without wealth, would the fine arts—in this hoity-toity, museum, stuffed-olive way—still exist? After all, the art museum, the art exhibitions and arguably even the art has been made for the wealthy because they’re the ones who fund it. The UM Museum does not seem like it was made for the often poor and rural subjects of its art. When I asked Maude for the contact information of Emma McShane, the woman in the frilly maid’s uniform who cared for Maude’s children, Maude said she didn’t have it, and when I looked online, I found that the two weren’t friends on Facebook either, which made me wonder, had Emma ever seen her own photo hanging on the wall in the Lawrence Gallery?
While going to school in Memphis, Maude drove Eggleston around in the “beautiful late afternoon light” and observed him work to “learn by osmosis.” Then, she moved to New York City for thirteen years and met her husband Langdon, who was a photographer and house painter, and who had dropped out of Harvard. Maude worked other jobs to “stay afloat” in the city. “I thought if I don’t end up homeless, I’ll probably end up as a topless dancer,” she joked, but later she said she always knew, if she really needed money, she could “call up mommy and daddy,” which was something I had also always known during my post-high school gap year, but seldom admitted. Maude’s fabricated anxieties about “staying afloat” fulfilled the well-loved archetype of the ‘starving artist’ and made me think about how well-off people, including myself, tend to downplay our privileges and exaggerate our ‘just scraping by’ narratives. I’ve probably told the story of eating cheap bologna and stale bread in Helsinki during my gap year many more times than I’ve told the story of seeing the musical Wicked front-row in Chicago when I was in third grade. Telling the ‘scraping by’ in Helsinki story made me feel like I fit in more with my college friends who often complained of student loans, part-time jobs and debt.
Every vacation and Christmas, Maude came back to the Delta and took photographs. “I thought my real work was here,” she said. In 1988, Maude and her husband came back to the Delta, and she’s been trying to keep a record of the place ever since. Up until this point in the interview, nearly twenty minutes in, I had only asked that initial question about her childhood. I normally have to prod artists to say more, but Maude had no problem giving me her whole life story. While she spoke, I noticed that Maude’s nails were groomed clean with a coat of clear polish. Meanwhile I tried to refrain from biting my mangled nails and bloody cuticles.
When she married Langdon, Maude hadn’t realized that two freelance photographers getting together would be “hell on the finances.” She said, “talk about a roller-coaster lifestyle.” I asked Maude, if finances were so tough, how could they afford to hire Emma McShane to raise their children? “To be honest with you,” she hesitated. “We lived off two, I guess you could say,‘fake’ trust funds.” Maude didn’t elaborate on what she meant by a fake trust fund and I didn’t ask because I worried that I’d be getting too personal, but I did notice it was the second time she had used that qualifier: Fake, not genuine.
Maude and I walked around the exhibit and thumbed through her 2015 book Mississippi History. She pointed out a photo of a woman with yellow-blonde hair sitting at a mahogany table in 1979. Golden sunlight shines on the woman’s wide blue eyes and drawn-on arched eyebrows.“They later told me that a couple of weeks before the photo, she had tried to commit suicide,” Maude said. “But all I could see was this incredible light and this beatific-looking woman but now that I think about it, she looks very troubled and scared.” Many of the other portraits in the collection were of Maude’s family. We turned the page to a photo of her husband, Langdon, young, shirtless and holding an empty beer glass while looking down in contemplation. “Isn’t he cute?” Maude asked. Other photographs included her daughter playing with kittens on their front porch, her daughter running through a cotton field, and her kids piling onto her husband for a piggy-back ride. When she’s dead for a hundred years, Maude said her photos will give people in the future an idea of what the world looked like and an idea of the people she encountered.
Maude was inspired by 19th century British portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who was “another one of those lucky white people who traveled around and had the leisure to be a photographer.” Maude’s bio on the Jackson Fine Art webpage reads that Cameron’s expressive and allegorical portraits inspired Maude’s “nostalgic recollection of carefree moments of family life and play in Mississippi in the 1980s,” which made me think of my mother. During my childhood, my mom, like Maude, took countless photos of my family, printed them and made probably at least twenty meticulous scrapbooks, full of ticket stubs, pamphlets and wristbands from our vacations in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and London, which makes me wonder, in a day and age when everyone is an iPhone photographer, how does our society determine which ‘family memories’ are considered ‘fine art’? What makes a photo of Langdon Clay holding a beer glass sell for $1,250? What makes someone hang up a photo of Maude’s husband, or Maude’s daughter, instead of hanging up a less professional photo of their own husband or daughter? Is it really only for the aesthetic—the perfect lighting, exposure, aperture—of Maude’s photography? Or is there something else more aspirational that catapults Maude’s “carefree moments of family life” into “fine art” worthy of being displayed?
What does it mean to make art from others’ lives? Is contextualization necessary? What does it mean for Wesley and me to stroll past a photograph of Emma McShane without knowing the life behind the photo? I guess the idea is that we should be able to infer McShane’s emotions from the portrait, but isn’t one photo just a sliver what of what’s really going on in someone’s life and in the “history of exploitation”? I guess Maude’s work makes me ask: is it enough to record the world around us, as we see it, or do we have a responsibility to critique it?
On Maude’s Facebook profile, she posted an article from The Paris Review called“What’s the Point?” by former Chairman of MacDowell Colony’s Board of Directors, Michael Chabon. The MacDowell Colony is an artist’s colony in New Hampshire founded by a philanthropic composer and pianist couple. Chabon essentially questions if art makes the world a better place and finishes with “maybe art just makes the whole depressing thing more bearable.” Chabon writes that to experience the truth in art reminds us that there is such a thing as truth.“We’re just going to keep on doing what we do: Making and consuming art.” I brought the article up to Maude. She offered me a mint, and recommended I read Michael Chabon’s novels. I accepted the mint and asked her how the article related to her work. She said that if she had to do it all over again, she’d want to become a teacher, or at least teach a bit. “I think if you can inspire or give a ray of hope to any person that’s trying to make sense of the world, that’s a noble cause,” she said, which did not answer my question. I asked Maude if she thought photography could bring about change, and she said her particular photos may not bring change, but by leaving a record of the way she sees the world, she hopes that someone will be changed or be cognizant of what that place looked like back then. “You can see I’m still really hung up on the sense of place.” Maude said she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to do this same work anywhere else besides Mississippi. “It’s like being compelled to explain this complicated place to the world.”
Desiring to explain a complicated situation, phenomenon or issue to the world is something I understand and struggle to do in my writing. I feel like I can never possibly write or research enough to fully do justice to the complexity, the facets, the layers, the nuances, dynamic personalities, countless strands of influence and pieces of meaning and memory. I’ve spent over a year working on one essay about my experiences with volunteer-tourism at an orphanage in Ghana. When I judge Maude, I feel like I am judging myself because I wonder what it means to make art from the lives of vulnerable children.
“Representing people always involves reducing them,” my favorite essayist, Leslie Jamison, writes. “And calling a project ‘done’ involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction.” Like me, Jamison always writes ten thousand more words than assigned because a part of her keeps saying, “there’s more, there’s more, there’s more.” And, I wonder, is Maude reducing or trying to show more? Her exhibit shows more and more of the people and landscape in her life: how they play, mature and love over the years. But is simply keeping a photographic record of her own life enough to really explain the complicated place of Mississippi to the world? Or is her work just one of the pieces of the full collage of Mississippi? And what about the people who exist on the periphery of Maude’s life, like Emma McShane, Jasper and Lucille, and other nameless black men, women and children? Are they represented, explained fully in all their complexity or reduced to how they fit tangentially into Maude’s bucolic life?
Jamison often writes about ‘thorniness,’ which at first I thought was a cop-out abstraction that allowed her to avoid coming to any substantial conclusions, but then I realized thorniness is the precise reason I’m so infatuated with Jamison’s writing—instead of rushing to produce something easy and dishonest, she takes her time to unravel all the minuscule knots and admits that she doesn’t know the answer because things are always more complicated than they seem. This type of writing, this type of art, is useful and conducive to change in the world because we can’t solve a problem unless we completely understand it first. And this type of complex and sometimes, honestly, down-right chaotic art is also beautiful.
“Her photographs were an act of insistence: that this woman existed, that her life mattered,” Leslie Jamison wrote of photographer Annie Appel, who spent twenty-five years photographing the same family in Baja, Mexico—with a focus on the daughter named Carmelita, whom Appel watched grow from a sick baby into a mother. “Annie’s photos don’t remove her subjects from their circumstances, but they don’t reduce them to their circumstances, either. She doesn’t conscript them into serving easy moralizing arguments about inequality or guilt.” Appel grew up in El Paso during the 1960s and 70s, and from her house up on a mountain in one of the wealthiest parts of the city, she remembers, as a kid, looking at Mexico in the distance at night. As an adult, she spent twenty-three thousand frames exploring the life in the distance. Appel insisted on maximum exposure, on not looking away as soon as you got what you needed. After nine years of photographing the family, Appel journaled, I understand nothing. Jamison describes Appel’s relentless drive toward connection and full communication an act of love. Love is a form of focused attention that Jamison argues sharpens Appel’s sight: “an enduring emotional investment—even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes—can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotion churning between ordinary moments.”
But are Appels’ attempts to show Carmelita and her family as they elect to be seen futile?“Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen,” Jamison writes, which makes me wonder if it is more honest of Maude to admit that she can only record the people in her life as she saw them? Which type of artistry is more honest: Leslie’s, Annie’sf and my futile attempts to say everything, to be intricately involved, to represent people as they elect to be seen, and risk sounding messy and unfocused, or the more conventional approach of Maude to admit that she can only record people as she sees them, in clean and crisp frames? Is Maude a coward for not even attempting to do more? Or are our styles just different—thick description versus snapshot aesthetic?
About a month after the interview with Maude, I went back to the exhibit on a drizzly November afternoon. I looked through the entire “Mississippi Stories” book again. As I looked at the portraits—a shaggy blonde boy dressed in black standing in front of a lavender bush, a redhaired woman turned with her back against fall leaves, Emma McShane in a cherry apron, a black man on one knee with a plate of ribs on his left leg in the late afternoon gold—I imagined a world in which Maude had not become a photographer and these photos did not exist. How awful. The photos were beautiful and captured mostly bucolic moments of leisure that calmed me from the pelting rain on the rooftop. Maybe I had been too hard on Maude in the interview and not everything always has to be about “change,” because a world without these photos would lose a great record of a time before iPhones and Wifi, video games and virtual realities. A time when children in Mississippi still went outside to horseplay, dance in the doorway, and run through a cotton field.
“These were stunning scenes not because they were extraordinary, but because they weren’t,” Leslie Jamison wrote of photographer Gary Winogrand’s Color exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in December 2019. Winogrand’s ‘snapshot aesthetic’ portrayed strangers in public spaces—beaches, highways, boardwalks, carnivals—in the 1950s and 60s. “They were full of ordinary people seen so clearly that they became extraordinary in their beauty.” Jamison wrote that the way Winogrand excavated beauty “suggested that anyone could be art” and that beauty lurked in “the strangest ruts and crevices,” which is what I also find appealing about Maude’s work. Her photographs record “ordinary” moments of the Mississippi Delta in the 1980s and 90s, which made me see the Mississippi in my own life as art. The fall leaves in the puddles outside the UM Museum; the stray black cat in my backyard; the peeling paint, dead moths and dust in the slits of my windowsills—all became art after visiting Maude’s exhibit a few times. But I also wondered what Jamison meant when she said “ordinary”? I wasn’t so sure Maude’s life was the‘ordinary’ experience of the majority of Mississippians in the Delta. What was ordinary to Maude was probably not ordinary to Emma McShane.
As I was looking through the book, Maude appeared in the entrance of the gallery. Somehow, she seemed more petite than I remembered, and she wore a silk scarf and black getup, which is what I’d always imagined an artist to look like. We chatted and I found out that Langdon’s sister and husband were in town from Wednesday to Sunday, so they were touring Oxford for the day. “It’s another excuse to visit the exhibit,” Maude said in her light, soft-spoken way. A camera was slung around Maude’s shoulder and I asked her if she took photos every day.“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I never go anywhere without a camera because I learned the hardest possible way that if you do that, you could be missing some stuff that you’ll still be thinking about and talking about years later.” I imagined the photos she would take that afternoon in a museum one day. Her brother-in-law thumbing through old records, her sister-in-law walking with an umbrella in the Square, and her husband sipping a mug of coffee between bookshelves.
A group of freshmen girls was gathered around the written biography section of the exhibit. “I’ve got to go eavesdrop on this,” Maude said and gave me a one-armed hug. “Hey, it was so nice to see you again!”
I rode my bike home to the three-bedroom house that I share with roommates. The next morning, I took a photo of the potted Cyclamen plant in my windowsill. The magenta petals were silhouetted by the sun-soaked kudzu in my backyard. How beautiful, I thought and really wanted to believe that was enough, that just by being beautiful and bucolic, something was art. Our culture has this perception that beauty is synonymous with simplicity, meaning beauty should be easy to understand and thus, restful. Flowers, blue skies, fall leaves, a child’s laugh— these are the things we agree upon as beautiful, and conveniently none of these things challenge or unnerve us. It’s easy to look at the blooming magenta and glowing green leaves in my windowsill and know immediately that it is beautiful. It’s easy to look at Maude’s bucolic photographs of her daughter in a cottonfield, Emma McShane holding Maude’s son at Christmas, a black woman in a garden full of purple, and know that these images are full of beauty. They’re beautiful because they’re easy to understand. Or at least they’re meant to be easy to understand—from Maude’s vantage point.
During our interview, Maude had shown me a photo of two black boys wearing wool hats and riding horses at Sardis Lake in 1979. A white pony is unfocused in the foreground, partially obscuring one boy’s face. The second boy holds the reins and looks at the camera. I asked Maude if she knew the boys in the photo and she said, “I basically rolled down my window and took the picture.” This photo stood out to Maude as an early example of the type of portrait she aimed to do in her career. “With portraits, you forge a relationship with that person, sometimes in a really short period of time, they bare their souls to you,” she said. “It’s a communing of humans.”
The photograph of the two black boys on horseback is considered beautiful precisely because we don’t know the boys’ names or their stories, because their daily lives are hidden away, obscured by this bucolic snapshot. If we did know their full, complex and possibly difficult life stories, we would probably be unnerved. Beauty should not be difficult. Beauty should not challenge us and make us see a perspective vastly different from our own—this type of art is considered ‘innovative’ or ‘experimental,’ which I seldom hear used in the same sentence as ‘beautiful.’ And I’m not immune to this mutual exclusivity of beauty and complexity. I recently went to an artist reception at Southside Gallery on the Oxford Square with Wesley and we saw a gritty mixed media painting of a pyramid of dented beer cans—Busch Light, Coors, Miller Lite. A piece of paper had been stapled to the top half of the composition and then torn off leaving only small scraps. “Wow, this is really unique,” I said to Wesley. We kept walking and came across a Charlie Buckley painting of a field of sunflowers with a warm soft purple sky. “Now, this is something that I would actually want to hang up in my house—it’s just so beautiful,” I said. “The beer can one is cool,” Wesley said. “But yeah, it wouldn’t be so nice to have to see it every day.”
Maude probably didn’t feel the need to stop and talk to the boys on horseback at Sardis because she didn’t think the boys’ stories were important for her mission of recording the‘bucolic’ state of the Mississippi Delta from her perspective. In fact, talking to the boys would’ve probably been counterproductive because she may’ve discovered that those boys’ lives were not bucolic at all. The boys are only bucolic, only pleasant aspects of the countryside, when they exist nameless in the backdrop of Maude’s privileged rustic life, or when they exist nameless on the walls of our museums and homes.