Langdon Clay made his initial visit to the Delta in 1971 on a cross country road trip from California to New York with his New England prep school friend, Lloyd Fonvielle. Fonvielle was from Wilmington, North Carolina, but neither he nor Langdon had ever been to the Deep South. They traveled in an MGB convertible, had sleeping bags and knew virtually no one, other than the couple of names given them by New York friends. After a pit stop in Memphis visiting Bill Eggleston, they somehow ended up in Rosedale, Mississippi. [Eggleston’s wife, Rosa Kate Dossett Eggleston, was from nearby Beulah.] Langdon, a then-fledgling photographer, was working on a series of photographs called A Day in the Life consisting of a picture of himself—either taken by a friend, stranger or, what would now be deemed as a “selfie,” a self-portrait— every day for an entire year. The photograph for October 10, 1971, taken by Lloyd Fonvielle, depicts Langdon on the front porch of the Colonial Inn in Rosedale, a landmark river hotel that later burned. [Historian Adrienne Beard notes: The Colonial, near the levee, was a frequent stop for whiskey boats, or “blind tigers” as the locals called them. Mississippi bootleggers outfitted small riverboats with casks of illegal corn whiskey and docked them behind the inn.] The thing Langdon says he remembers most succinctly about that trip was seeing open fields of cotton for the first time and the smell of defoliant, which for many years afterward he assumed was the smell of cotton. He also recalls meeting a Delta State student who, after confiding his mother had recently discovered his pot in his sock drawer, invited them to sleep on his dorm room floor.
When Langdon returned to New York City, he began the project 16th Street, photographing his block between 6th and 7th Avenues every day for two months. Working on photographic series became an obsession, and from 1974-76 he traversed the streets of Manhattan at night looking for cars that “matched” their backgrounds. This color work was shown in 1978 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Lo
By 1982, he had switched over to architectural photography, gotten a book deal to photograph Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and focused on a career working for various architects and “shelter magazines,” such as Architectural Digest and House and Garden. He and his new wife (yes, dear readers, it was I) were making pilgrimages from New York in the summers and holidays to visit her family in the Mississippi Delta. Though they moved to Sumner in 1987, Langdon was still flying out of Memphis weekly, working on books like From My Chateau Garden in Burgundy, France, and photographing houses, gardens, and food all over the world.
In contrast to his commercial work, he began to be drawn to photographing life in the Delta. One of his ongoing
The main thing Langdon says he wants to do is leave a record of what these places, whether Paris or the Mississippi Delta, looked like in our particular time period. “In ten years or one hundred years, through photographs we’ll see what was here. It is too much hubris to say that this was what life was like, but it’s not too much to say this was what life looked like.”