Like many people born in the Delta, Kathleen Robbins may have had to leave home to see as she does. We all have trouble seeing clearly without the perspective offered by distance. While a native daughter never fully leaves the Delta, being away-in New Mexico or South Carolina-brings change. Looking at Robbins’s photographs I’m regularly reminded of Laura, Eudora Welty’s character from Delta Wedding. “Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it,” Welty writes as Laura rides the trainfrom Jackson down intotheDelta. “In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky.” Robbins’s photographs Dad’s Apple Tree and Mom New Year’s Eve, 2007 give us that great sense of the world seeming mostly sky, of the diminutive nature of human presence and imprint. While the land and the sky dominate, what is so particular and also so universal is right there for us in the photographic frame. Land and sky seem the final equalizer here in these Delta photographs, where everyone and everything gets similarly swallowed by the landscape, all treated one and the same.

There’s a reverence to Robbins’s point of view-no nostalgia or obligatory embrace-in the way she looks directly at a deeply global place through the intimate familiarity of her relationship to people and place. Her photographs inhabit the space they come from-or as she says, “re-inhabit”-since they are at once about home and about a return to home, about what has been known for a long time and about rediscovering new ways of knowing. There is no anonymity here, no sense that we’re simply passing through. The figures we meet in Robbins’s photographs are not “subjects” but instead are “her people.”

She views an African American church in the rain not from a mysterious and unexplained vantage point, but instead from Dad’s Cadillac.

The dogs in Robbins’s photographs seem like family, and her 2011 portrait of a sweetgum tree is Mom’s Sweetgum Tree, 2011. There’s a transforming luminance in her picturing of the familial, finding that photographic sense that Welty saw when she wrote of the Delta, “The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.” That shimmering touch is ever present in the photograph Me on Belle Chase, 2008, where we feel the power of “Delta” time and space completely interwoven with Robbins’s inclusively endless shadow, an image with incantations of then, now, and later.

When we first meet Little Steele (in Little Steele, Christmas Day, 2006), we know there must be a Big Steele, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Later, of course, he appears in Big Steele in the Ivy, 2009, the kind of wonderful reward that a good story delivers in time. It’s the return that provides the gift, Robbins’s return home, once and again and again, and the way her story circles back and around, making some things clear and suggesting through other things, the unexplainable complexity of these flatlands. It’s impossible to say Money, Mississippi, without evoking the tragedy of Emmett Till and the deep residue of that history. And in Money Elementary, 2009 we can feel the cold encroachment of water and time and the dissolution of everything within the image on this chilled blue day.