Photographer Jane Rule Burdine has written that her work provides "glimpses of the impact the people of this area have had upon the land and the impression the land has made upon its inhabitants." But when talking to Burdine--who exhibited in the Center's Gammill Gallery earlier this fall--it becomes clear that the very thing that makes her color images so compelling is the impact of the people and the landscape of the Mississippi Delta on the photographer herself.

The Delta is forever home to Burdine, a native of Greenville, despite her having resided since 1984 in the hills of north Mississippi, in Oxford and then Taylor (where she even served as mayor for 12 years). Before that, she lived in Jackson for several years and in Baton Rouge for a short time. And although she jokes that "there are things outside of the Delta that fascinate" her, Burdine has always returned home often, taking breaks from visiting with family and friends in Greenville to set off in her car alone, roaming the highways and back roads in an around her hometown.

Burdine says she'd been taking snapshots on her adventures for a while--photos of such things as "bugs on fences"--but it was in the early 1970s, after she had finished her undergraduate degree at Ole Miss and was working toward a master's in sociology there, that her view of her own photography changed. Burdine had bought a book of Dorothea Lange's Depression-era images and then became interested in Margaret Bourke-White and other photographers of that time.

"I was galvanized by the intensity and the narrative quality of those photographs," she says. "I realized when I saw those photographs that I was seeing however many years later the same things, the same poverty, the same physical environment. I was also seeing the same inner spirit of strength, particularly that the older people had--I was able to see that in visiting with them and their children."

Burdine says her approach has always been aleatory, that in the early years, whenever she saw something or someone whose picture she wanted to take, she'd simply turn her car around and go back for it. "I'd drive up and folks would say, 'That's the lady that just drove by,' " Burdine says. "I'd have my camera over my shoulder and I'd visit with people. I felt by taking pictures I was bringing a little bit of joy to the folks that I met, but they of course in turn gave that joy back to me ten-fold." She worries about sounding overly sentimental or idealistic, but adds, "God gave me the gift to look into people's eyes through the camera and they give of themselves back to my eyes and to those of the world in the finished portraits."

That gift has perhaps been evident from the start, from her first public exhibition, at Hinds Community College in 1972; to the mid-1970s when she started selling; to her work in Baton Rouge for the Louisiana Tourism Bureau; to her work documenting the residents of Tunica's infamous Sugar Ditch in the 1980s; to later commercial work including portraits, magazine shoots and book covers; and back to exhibiting, across the country in the decades since that first exhibition--and with the likes of William Christenberry and William Eggleston.

There are now three decades' worth of Burdine's photographs, and she has set about organizing and digitizing them, though it's been a slow process. She hopes that perhaps some of those photos will make it into print as a collection--a book no doubt would be a boon not only for fans of photography but also for those interested in having a tangible document of Delta life.

As always, Burdine is still looking homeward. She hopes to create a team--much like the team of Ole Miss faculty she originally worked with--and return to Sugar Ditch to study and document what's happened there since she last photographed it, since its residents have been moved out of their dilapidated homes and into government housing, since the casinos have come to Tunica. And she hopes, too, that with the help of her former Ole Miss sociology professor Vaughan Grisham, she can fund and create a comprehensive documentary project on the Delta."I envision a three- or four-year project," Burdine says. "I want to go back into the Delta and cover it from stem to stern, from the lobby of the Peabody to Catfish Row, as the quote goes."

Jennifer Southall