Three is the smallest number that unveils a discernible pattern—a threshold where randomness gives way to order. It shapes how we perceive and interpret the physical world: spatial dimensions, primary colors, laws of motion. We often trisect our understanding of time (past, present, and future), and mortal existence (birth, life, and death).

In Threes: Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, and Sophia Clay presents the intertwined visions of a married couple—celebrated Southern photographers Maude and Langdon Clay—and their youngest daughter, Sophia, who is forging her own artistic path at age 30. Anchored in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner (population: 278), the Clays’ collective body of work spans decades, revealing not just a shared craft, but a deeply personal bond. This exhibition, their first as a family, illuminates the legacies we inherit, shape, and transmit.

The curation centers on threes: groupings link their images in sets, blurring stylistic boundaries and exposing patterns of repetition and divergence. Some triptychs carry a narrative arc across frames; others isolate a single visual element. Together, their works—sometimes of the same subject, often of each other—trace a visual dialogue across generations.

Maude gravitates toward the animate—spontaneous portraits, the world in motion; Langdon seeks beauty in the built environment—facades, cars, structures. Sophia, perhaps unsurprisingly, wryly yet lovingly attends to both. Where their styles diverge, they still maintain a mutual need to observe and record life as it presents itself. Evident in this selection of images is the family’s shared reverence for the alchemy of late afternoon light, a world awash in vivid color. Also apparent is their keen awareness that any subject illuminated in that world—a building, a found object, a person—is bound and transformed by, and ultimately lost to time.

These works, many exhibited here for the first time, offer a fresh view of the Clays’ artistic legacy, where time, family, and place converge.

-Ashley Gates

Langdon Clay

Born in New York City in 1949, Langdon Clay was raised in New Jersey and Vermont and attended school in New Hampshire and Boston. Clay moved to New York in 1971 and spent the next 16 years photographing there, throughout the United States and in Europe for various magazines and books. In 1987 he moved to Mississippi where he has since lived, worked, and raised three children with his wife, photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. Clay’s work is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. Steidl published Clay’s Cars, New York City, 1974–1976 in 2016. Upcoming books from Steidl are Tuesday’s Just As Bad and 42nd Street 1979, 2011, 2023

Please join us for a Do Good Salon on Thursday, October 9, at 6:00 PM featuring the Clay Family and curator-photographer Ashley Gates.

Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude Schuyler Clay was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, where she continues to live and work. After assisting William Eggleston in Memphis, she moved to New York City, worked at the Light Gallery, and was later a photo editor at Vanity Fair, Esquire and Fortune. Clay returned to live in the Delta in 1987 and was photography editor of the Oxford American magazine from 1999 to 2004. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. Clay’s books include Delta Land (1999), Delta Dogs (2014), and Mississippi History (2015) with Steidl. Upcoming from Steidl will be This Beautiful World (2025)

Sophia Clay

Sophia Clay (b. 1994) is a photographer from the Mississippi Delta, living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work centers around the temporality of the man made within the natural, often focusing on how the natural world reclaims a space. She finds a particular beauty in ordinary or mundane objects. Her work has been exhibited at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery in New Orleans Louisiana, and Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi.