Burning Winter Wheat; homage to J.M.W. Turner, near Lambert, MS, 2009

Langdon Clay

Archival Pigment Print

H. 15 ½; W. 22" image size
H. 23¼; W. 26¾" framed

About the Artist

Langdon Clay was born in the middle of a hurricane in New York City in 1949. He grew up in New Jersey and Vermont and went to school in New Hampshire and Boston. He got his first camera on St. Patrick's Day 1968. His first roll of film was of Robert Kennedy leading the parade in New York. Three months later, the presidential candidate was assassinated.

Clay moved to New York in 1971 and spent the next 16 years photographing there, around the country, and in Europe for magazines and books like Jefferson's Monteceillo by Howard Adams and Burgandy cookbook My Chateau Kitchen by Anne Willen.

His book CARS 1974-1976 was published by Stiedl in November 2016. Cars were an indispensable aspect of twentieth-century culture, both for their utility and aesthetics. From 1974 to 1976, Clay photographed the cars he encountered while wandering the streets of New York City and nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, at night. Shot in Kodachrome with a Leica and deftly lit with then new sodium vapor lights, the pictures feature a distinct array of makes and models set against the gritty details of their surrounding urban and architectural environments, and occasionally the ghostly presence of people.

"I experienced a conversion of sorts in making a switch from the 'decisive moment' of black and white to the marvel of color, a world I was waking up to every day. At the time it seemed like an obvious and natural transition. What was less obvious was how to reflect my world of New York City in color... I discovered that night was its own color and I fell for it." - Langdon Clay

In 1987, he moved to Mississippi and has worked from there with his wife, photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. They have three adult children, Anna, Schuyler, and Sophie.

Clay and his wife, photographer Maude Schyuler Clay, are exhibiting at the University of Mississippi Museum for the first time together from September 17, 2019 until February 15, 2020.

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