Bill Steber clearly remembers the pivotal moment in 1992 that fueled his obsession with documenting the disappearing culture of the Delta and northeast Mississippi’s hill country.
Steber, then a photojournalist, was assigned to shoot a travel story in Mississippi. On the return home via Highway 61, he visited James “Son” Thomas, a blues musician and folk artist. Entering the house, Steber passed one of Thomas’ more interesting creations—a sculptural figure of a woman lying in a casket. “It was one of those rare moments in life where you can feel the direction changing,” he recalls. The time was ripe for a new direction.
The geography that unfolds as one heads north from central Mississippi is compelling, for the Delta indeed is an otherworldly place where fields run for miles; massive pecan groves spring out of the flats, and little towns cluster around their churches. For a man steeped in reverence for the blues, the place was pure addiction. “The leitmotif of all, everything I do is motivated by music,” says Steber. “That’s what’s behind everything.”
His total involvement and connection with the people and places he has photographed have made him an insider in the community of the Mississippi blues culture. He is able to get the most intimate images because he is one of them, and his subjects pay no particular attention to him. He reveres the culture both as a photographer and as a musician himself. “I am always trying to provide a visual to the soundtrack that plays in my head,” says Steber, whose black-and-white images of blues musicians, baptisms, cotton fields, and juke joints have graced the covers of many national publications.
Four years ago, Steber and his wife, Pat Casey Daley, attended a workshop by upstate-New York-based John Coffer, who is known for reviving the almost-lost art of wet-plate photography. A quiet new obsession ensued. “If you see this being done, that alone will make you fall in love with this process,” says Steber, referring to the all-day excursions required to produce even one perfect image.
“The fact is it’s so slow, you have to exert more control over the subject. It’s about as far away as you can get from street photography.”
He remains an artist focused on quality who holds onto the skills and techniques of traditional photography. For Bill Steber, the lessons that emerge from the past are good ones. “I’ve learned to trust the serendipity of accidents,” he says, “and be open to where it leads me.”
www.steberphoto.com
Bill Steber is represented by The Arts Co., 215 5th Ave. N, Nashville, TN
by Elizabeth Betts Hickman
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