“Delta Dogs” is the collection of Maude Schuyler Clay’s recent black-and-white photographs.

“Suncoast Horses” could have been the title of her first creative black-and-white photo.

Clay, 55, took the photo when she was 10 at her family’s winter home in Sarasota, Fla. “One day I had this epiphany that I was going to take my plastic horses and put them out in the St. Augustine grass in the backyard,” she said. “I got down with my little Instamatic from the point of view of somebody lying down in the grass and photographed those plastic horses. And I remember thinking, ‘This is really something.’ ”

A native of Sumner, Miss., Clay is best known for her 1999 book of black-and-white photos, “Delta Land,” a collection she describes as “lugubrious black-and-white landscapes of the Mississippi Delta.”

“To this day, I have people who come up and tell me how much they love that book and how much it reminds them of the Mississippi Delta,” Clay says. “It’s the land of myth. It’s the land of dark history. It’s the land of open sky and open field. And I just somehow wanted to put all that into truth and beauty in photographs.”

The first photo she took for that series was of a dog on a cypress log in a swamp.

“He was just serene and he sort of struck this John Barrymore profile. He just looks like the most noble creature.”

Years later, Clay thought of the photo when trying to come up with a new series of photographs. “I needed a second act after ‘Delta Land.’” As she continued taking landscape pictures, she noticed the “indigenous canine presence” on her contact sheets.

“In other words, there’s so many wild dogs in the landscape. They were giving it a kind of scale that just the pure landscape pictures in ‘Delta Land’ did not have.

So, that’s when I glommed onto the idea, ‘Well, here’s a project — ‘Delta Dogs.’ ”

She culled 35 dog photos from more than 300 for her current show at Perry Nicole Fine Art. “Some of them are running away. Some of them are standing there very defiantly.”

None of them are hers. “I have three dogs — Zelda, Topsy and Ishmael.”

She also has three children — Anna, Sophia and Schuyler — and a husband, photographer Langdon Clay.

Still living in the almost 100-year-old family homestead, Clay is the third and probably last of the Minnie Maude Mays in her family. “Maude,” she says, is “a name nobody gives to anything but a dog or a mule.”

When she began taking the idea of becoming a photographer seriously, Clay turned to her first cousin, the famous photographer William Eggleston. “I was totally enamored of him and his work. When I would go over to his house, he would have these 2-foot high stacks of black-and-white prints ’cause he was literally photographing Memphis — all the buildings, all the people, all the shopping centers.”

Eggleston helped her buy her first 35-millimeter camera when she was 16. “He started giving me books like ‘The Decisive Moment’ by (Henri) Cartier-Bresson. And he befriended people like Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.”

Clay went to the University of Mississippi. “Hated it. This was the early ’70s. I was not material for sororities. I could have been. I didn’t want to be. I was in the middle of a personal revolution.”

She convinced her parents to send her to school in Mexico, at The Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. She tried her hand at welding, but was better at printing her photos.

Clay later enrolled at Memphis Academy of Arts (now Memphis College of Art), where the faculty at the time included Burton Callicott, Veda Reed, Ted Rust, Ted Faiers and Murray Riss. “They were very much involved with giving you a formal education. We learned to draw. We learned to paint. We learned to do sculpture. Design theory.”

Clay also learned from Eggleston. “We would go riding around just in late afternoon because that’s when he was interested. It was that beautiful orangey light.

“He doesn’t really give me advice, but he definitely was an influence. I think he likes my work. But one of the things I did was try to not make a Bill Eggleston photograph.

“I’m so enamored of what he does and he does it so brilliantly, but when people take those kind of photographs, they’re so much of an imitation of Bill’s work that I didn’t want to be in that category.”

Instead of completing school, Clay moved to New York. “I thought it was the most glamorous, exciting, culturally just accessible place in the world. And they spoke English.”

Through Eggleston, she got a job at the Light Gallery, where she met the famous photographers of the day, including Andre Kertesz, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.

Beginning in 1980 and continuing for 20 years, Clay took a series of low-light photos with a Rolleiflex. She took pictures of people on the street. And her children. “They were my great subjects/victims.”

During her first pregnancy, Clay worked as a photo editor at Vanity Fair and Esquire. “I came home to Sumner to have the baby and (planned to) go back to New York and my life. And it’s never happened.”

In addition to the Mississippi landscape and dogs, Clay’s portrait subjects include B.B. King, Jim Dickinson, Bobby Blue Bland and Koko Taylor. She’s photographed Morgan Freeman, who owns a dozen of her landscapes.

She also took photos of Eudora Welty, who was “just hilarious,” “a great photographer” and someone who “could drink you under the table.”

Clay remembers being with Welty at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Welty had received one of her numerous awards for writing. “She’s knocking back the bourbon, as usual. On one side of her is Diane Keaton. On the other side is Jennifer Beals. That ‘Flash Dance’ movie had just come out. They were just the biggest literary groupies talking about, ‘Oh, how much they loved her work.’ And they’d love to one day maybe adapt some of her stories for a screenplay. Fawn. Fawn.

“So, when they left the room, she looks at me and she says, ‘Those girls were so cute. Do you have any idea who they were?’ She was kind of out of the loop on things like that.”

Michael Donahue: 529-2797