Stomping nuts with Bill Steber

BILL STEBER IS A RENOWNED PHOTOGRAPHER WHO HAS DOCUMENTED BLUES CULTURE in Mississippi for the last three decades. His photos are intimate and immersive, as if the viewer can hear and smell and feel the essence of what he's so stunningly captured. 

With his lens, Bill exposes the common, the hidden and obscure. His photos grant access to a world that feels foreign yet oddly familiar in its shared human experience. 

With a body of work known worldwide, Bill's photos include blues musicians and juke jivers, churches and river baptisms, folk rituals and hoodoo practitioners, farming methods and prison inmates—each revealing uncommon traditions that birthed or shaped the blues. 

Bill's life's trajectory was set in 1992, when he was just 27 and experienced the "single most transformative thing in my life, the drive, the Delta, everything."

It was a sculpted figure of dead woman lying in a wooden coffin. Being that it was life-size, the piece occupied significant space in the shotgun shack of its owner, James Henry "Son Ford" Thomas, an internationally-known Delta bluesman and folk artist whose sculptures reflect his work as a gravedigger. 

It was pure chance that brought Bill to Leland to meet Son and Pat Thomas (shown at left), one of Son's six children. 

He was on assignment for The Tennessean to cover a recently completed parkway from Natchez to Nashville. Bill remembers that day in 1992 like it was yesterday, when he and a writer colleague drove out of Natchez, which was the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans.  

"The air in Natchez was heaviest, like it was hard to breathe. The humidity, heavy moss on trees, ghosts bumping around in the street. Then that deep heavy foliage opens up to fields—and you almost can breathe again."

Bill had never been to the Mississippi Delta, and figured they could eke out a day to explore. Better yet, his colleague happened to know the former director of Mississippi tourism, Malcom White, who owned Hal & Mal's in Jackson. The pair swung by the eatery, met with White, and came away with a list of phone numbers and addresses for some of the Delta's best bluesmen, some obscure, some not. That list brought him to Son Thomas. 

As they continued road tripping north into the Delta, Bill  remembers a visceral felling, like the music had hit the landscape, and the two were inextricably tied together.

"Emotionally, it was both a calm and excitement in the air, a kind of thrill, indefinable thrill, a wholeness and a calm. I felt grounded to a place," says Bill, a kid who grew up in very rural Tennessee and was the first generation to experience school integration in 1970.

"Suddenly all things made sense to me. I felt like this is my place. Every place has a certain energy, and that place vibrates in return. Whatever the wavelength, I'm locked in on that. I realized the culture created in the Mississippi Delta was wholly unique in American history."

Bill's work has brought him to a racial reckoning of sorts.

"I've learned more about my particular white privilege, partly racial but economic too. You can check off all the privilege boxes: I'm a white Anglo-Saxon middle-age white guy, someone who doesn't have a trust fund and went to public schools." 

There's the existential questions: Who owns the culture? Who gets to interpret the culture? 

"I wrack my brain and my heart over that. The idea of permissions. 'Who gives you permission to do this?' I've been reckoning with this from the very beginning, it's always in my thoughts."

Bill continues in this philosophical and relevant vein: "I have a deep responsibility as an interpreter of the culture. How do I handle that responsibility? There's Walker Evans' cool formalism which codifies the subject and composition emotionally. Then there's Eugene Richards, who's deeply engaged, highly interpretive, fearless emotionally, the most revelatory and expressive and interpretive in the world."

Just like Evans and Richards, Bill knows his work, in and of itself, will be interpreted and "slightly romanticized." To continue that work, Bill admits he has to overcome aspects of representation—the "what" and "how" he represents Mississippi blues culture in his photography. 

"If I'm deeply honest with myself regarding my experience, it's borne of a deep love for the people, the culture, the landscape, the music. My hope is that this sincere love carries through toward a kind of honesty toward my limitation of having a deeper understanding about the culture I'm capturing. I can compensate for this, but I can never overcome it."