Writers | Photo Essayists

“A good snapshot keeps the moment from running away.” –Eudora Welty

“You have a story when you take a photograph, but it’s so interesting how other people make their own myths about that photograph,” says Maude Schuyler  Clay. She’s answering host Gene Edwards’ question about the stories her images tell. The Sumner, Mississippi, photographer joins Jane Rule Burdine and Birney Imes in the opening segment of Writers: Photo Essayists.

All three guests have published beautiful books chronicling the Magnolia State, and all three abundantly share their photographs as they talk of what they shoot and why.

“Thinking of myself as an archivist, I went out and tried to capture the things that were disappearing,” Clay says of her black and white pictures of delta “field churches, mule barns, cypress houses.” She jokes that all these things were being “reclaimed by nature.”  These images fill her book “Delta Land.”

Jane Rule Burdine first “picked up a camera” in the late 1960s. Initially, she “took pictures of horses and cows and bugs on fences.” After a mentor gave her a show, she taught herself more about this art, and then “just kept on from that” with the hopes of eventually creating a book. That book, “Delta Deep Down,” was published in 2008.

 “Just getting out and photographing and looking at books” is how Birney Imes began. He’s published three collections. In “Juke Joint,” he recorded “these mysterious places that had wild painting on the wall and just all this other worldly type of life.” “Partial to Home” also allowed him to explore a world unfamiliar to him, but “Whispering Pines” is comprised of fascinating photographs of only one place—a roadhouse of the same name.

With beautiful photographs of the land and the people who inhabit it, these three photographers agree that “it does help when you’re not just victimizing somebody by taking their photograph.” Clay expands. “The nature of photography is about the moment and the instant and whatever relationship you forge with a person. It may not take you a long time, but then there’s this lasting image and people make of it what they want.”

Lasting images were the starting point for photographer Eric Etheridge. He’s Gene Edwards’ second guest and he talks about his mesmerizing book “Breach of Peace, Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders.” “I was looking for a photography project and I was looking to work with historical images,” says Etheridge. “And I just one day flashed on the Sovereignty Commission files.” Upopn calling the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, he learned that there were about 500 mug shots in the collection. “I saw two of them. They were stunning images, and I realized that I had my project.”

The Freedom Rider’s name, address, and birth date were on the back of each mug shot. “I just started cold calling people.” After making Etheridge traveled the country interviewing and photographing the Freedom Riders. The pages of his book pair the 1961 photographs with his compelling, contemporary portraits—and their individual stories.

“It interests me that almost to a man and a woman, they went ahead and made something of themselves,” observes host Gene Edwards. Then he asks how the project changed the author/photographer. “The thing that I didn’t expect for was how profound it would be for me to learn my own history,” Etheridge answers. This native Mississippian who was four in 1961 adds, “that’s what I’m hope to sort of share through the book, as well.”

History is the sole topic of the third segment. Researchers Turry Fluker and Phoenix Savage used photographs from many sources to tell the story of “African Americans of Jackson.” Using only pictures, their book traces local Black history from the first images available. “Photography at that time was not a snapshot process,” comments Savage. “You had to sit and you had to wear your best and be still for a moment or two and be remembered.”

“I’ve been around locals who are flipping though the book, and they recognize an aunt or a relative or they recognize the church,” she continues. “And they begin to tell their stories.

Stories told with words because of stories told without words. Writers: Photo Essayists.