This isn't the most recent photo of me, but it's one of my favorites-partly because it was taken at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, MS across the hall from the room where Bessie Smith died in 1937. Also, I feel like I can use it again now that I've lost some weight-I finally look like this again! (well, close enough). -Bill Steber
Bill Steber was born and raised in middle Tennessee and his interest in photography began in elementary school as he used one of his father’s cameras on school trips and Boy Scout campouts. It was on one such campout at age 11 that Steber took an abstract photo that gave him what would be his first published photo.
After attaining degrees in Photography and English from Middle Tennessee State University, Steber spent the next 15 years making a name for himself in journalism, working as a staff photojournalist for the Tennessean in Nashville and winning dozens of regional and national photography awards.
But it was for work outside the newspaper that Steber is best known. In 1992, he found a way to combine his passions for photography and music by beginning an ambitious photographic survey of Blues culture in Mississippi with an old Hasselblad camera and lots of black and white film. Since then, he has set out to document every living blues musician associated with Mississippi as well as most of the state’s juke joints, churches, river baptisms, hoodoo practitioners, traditional farming methods, folk traditions and every other cultural tradition that gave birth to or influenced the Blues.
Steber won grants to support this work from The Maine Photographic Workshops and the Morrie Camhi award as well as being an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow in 1998 that gave him a year-long sabbatical from the Tennessean to pursue the Blues project. He has shown his work in galleries and museums around the country including a one-man show at the Saba Gallery in New York that was featured in the New Yorker magazine in 2000.
Currently, Steber is a freelance photographer living in Murfreesboro, TN. His editorial work is published in regional, national and international magazines. The Mississippi work is represented by art galleries around the country. He has plans to publish four books from the Mississippi Blues project, combining the still photos with extensive interviews, writings, audio and video collected in the field to create a comprehensive survey of Mississippi blues culture that represents more than a decade of the region’s history.
