McCormick Book Inn Reviews

Delta Deep Down
by Jane Rule Burdine
WINNER OF THE 2009 MISSISSIPPI INSTITUTE OF ARTS & LETTERS AWARD FOR PHOTOGRAPHY

September 2008

The Mississippi Delta evokes mystery, beauty, and hardship in equal measures. Its haunted fields, turbulent history, and resilient people have fueled countless songs, tales, and literary works, and its presence resonates strongly in the construction of the American South.

In Delta Deep Down, photographer Jane Rule Burdine captures this quintessential region of her birth with clarity and warmth.

Since the early 1970s, Burdine has used the Delta as her muse, traversing and documenting the ever-changing landscape in color photographs. The powerful images included in this collection reflect how the Delta and its citizens have responded to each other, and how each has in turn been changed.

Novelist and Indianola native Steve Yarbrough offers a touching, personal introduction that explores how Burdine's photographs reveal the place he once called home, and how, through her photographs, the hold this fertile ground claims on his heart is reinforced.

Weatherbeaten shacks, cotton and soybean fields, industrial equipment, people at work and play, and cloud-draped, endless horizons are all seen through Burdine's lens. The Delta's past and present mingle in every photograph of the inhabitants--black and white, young and old, rich and poor--in moments of contemplation, hard work, and joyous revelry.
Yarbrough is the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno, whose fiction includes The Oxygen Man, Prisoners of War, The End of California, and other novels and story collections.
 
Wendy McDaris provides historical context and locates Burdine's work among current trends in fine art photography. She is a curator/cultural critic living in upstate New York and editor/essayist for Visualizing the Blues: Photographs of the American South, among other art catalogs.

 

Greenville native Jane Rule Burdine is a photographer based in Taylor, Mississippi. 
The image that Jane Rule's book both begins and ends on is haunting precisely because it captures the past that's always lurking within the Delta's present. There is some-thing surreal, almost Kafkaesque on display here. A farmer with his back to us drives a tractor straight ahead on a lonely dirt road. Big woods loom on the left. On the right, at the edge of a field of cotton, a grey-clad horseman moves in the opposite direction,
a ghost returning to history.

Steve Yarbrough, from the introduction

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Novelist and Indianola native Steve Yarbrough offers a touching, personal introduction that explores how Burdine's photographs reveal the place he once called home.

The Mississippi Delta connotes mystery, beauty, hardship; songs, tales, literary works.

Our fields, hamlets, and resilient people have left varied imprints on not only the continuing history of the American South and the United States, but the world. Photographer Jane Rule Burdine captures this place as perhaps only a daughter of the Delta can, in her first book of photographs, Delta Deep Down.

Burdine has explored and documented the ever-evolving Delta in color photographs since the early 1970s. There is a commonality in these collected photographs as haunting and as beautiful as the land itself. With clarity and warmth, her imagery reaches across artificial barriers of culture, race, and time to reveal core connections between subject and viewer.

Burdine's Delta at work, at play, resting, waiting, absent -- is captured in penetrating tonalities and glowing chroma. The sense of immediacy, palpable as a fistful of blue gumbo clay, is magical.

The pictures are presented simply, without comment. There are organic, seemingly abandoned shacks and buildings; cotton and soybean fields; farm equipment; timeless faces, places, gatherings. And of course, there is the land. Burdine creates her landscapes with tender nuance, evoking the same unsentimental sense of intimacy in scenes as in portraits.

 

 

Because these images hold the roots and references Deltans' carry throughout life, wherever that life is lived, Burdine has not recorded relics, but has depicted living icons. Delta Deep Down is more than a handsome coffee table book. It is more that the latest perfect gift or souvenir. Jane Rule Burdine's Delta Deep Down is every Deltan's visual autobiography.      mdm

Yarbrough is the James and Coke Hallowell Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno, whose fiction includes The Oxygen Man, Prisoners of War, The End of California, and other novels and story collections.
 
Wendy McDaris provides historical context and locates Burdine's work among current trends in fine art photography. She is a curator/cultural critic living in upstate New York and editor/essayist for Visualizing the Blues: Photographs of the American South, among other art catalogs.