The photographs of Susan Wides convey the experience of not merely being in a place, but of connecting to that place on multiple levels of consciousness. Wides' photographs rely deeply on light, space and time in order to dissolve, intensify and filter our visualization of a place. Merleau-Ponty writes of Cêzanne's struggle to paint “an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.” The subtle complexity of Wides' images fuse feeling and thought, requiring us to slow down and contemplate where we are, and thus the very "why" and "how" of our being.

From early childhood, Susan Wides was inspired by her three great aunts in Manhattan — early 20th century feminists and artists within her matriarchy who established a core that has sustained her dedication to independent artistic thought and feminism throughout her life and artistic career. Painting and photographing outdoors in the 60s and 70s, Wides established a fascination with fieldwork that became crucial to her photographic method.

In 1977, Wides studied art at Indiana University with a mentor, the esteemed artist Henry Holmes Smith, a colleague of Moholy Nagy and an exemplar of experimental modernism. Here, Wides was awarded the position of photographer of artifacts at the Indiana University Museum. In 1979, Wides moved to New York City and worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art printing photographs, meditating intensely on artworks in its collection. These positions continued Wides’ formative experiences of looking deeply at art and artifacts within a museum context. In New York, Wides lived downtown, and was part of the currents of experimental blurring of artistic distinctions, conceptual art and social critique of this period. This stimulation inspired Wides to use conceptual art, the humanities, and hallucinogenic perception as entry points into her photographic methods.

Wides’ relationships with artists in New York and her role as a museum photographer led to a fascination in the intersection of experimental practices within institutional settings that would result in her 'Waxworld' series (1983-1990), a response to the fictions of the Reagan years. 'Waxworld' used the question of where reality ends and illusion begins — a given subject of the waxwork displays—as a starting point for exploring a wide range of human interaction within both public and private spheres, photographing in wax museums throughout North America and Europe. In 1988, Steve Dietz | Aperture collaborated with Wides in the editing and sequencing of a book of 'Waxworld.'

Wides’s first solo show took place in Paris in 1990 at Gilles Dustin’s storied Urbi et Orbi Galerie, contextualized with gallery artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Barbara Kasten, Nan Goldin, Thomas Struth, and James Casebere. In 1992, Olivier Zahm curated 'Sphinx' with Wides, Thomas Ruff and Bill Henson in Nice, FR. 'Fictive Strategies: Actuality and Originality' featured Wides alongside Sarah Charlesworth, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, and Louise Lawler.

In 1992, Wides began her second museum series, titled 'The Name of And,' in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, partly in response to losing friends who had passed away from AIDS. Reading this culturally fabricated language of flowers, Wides surrounded the oval images in black and used selective focus to reclaim the flower as an expression of transience, loss and desire. Vince Aletti wrote: "The flowers in Wides' iris shots all have name tags that swim into focus almost by accident and work like found poetry… [and] suggest an ironic but fiercely tenacious femininity, a realm of the senses you can only enter through the looking glass."

These two projects were featured at the High Museum’s 'Museum Studies' show in 1997 alongside Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Fred Wilson. While critiquing and questioning the museum, the artists regarded these places with fascination and affection. In 2000, 'The Name of And' was exhibited in 'After Eden, Garden Varieties in Contemporary Art,' a show at Middlebury College alongside Joseph Beuys, Peter Campus, Andy Goldsworthy, Dan Graham, Jenny Holzer and Kerry James Marshall.

In the mid-90s, Wides pivoted from the museum to work more directly with "place" near her residences in the city and the country. With a 4 x 5-inch view camera, Wides deepened her experiments with the language of the lens by twisting a movable lens, thereby distorting the camera’s plane of focus to create abstracted images, each with zones of sharp focus. As Wides intensified her innovative use of selective focus, she conveyed a sense of perceptual absorption — visible emanations from the myopic eye of the mind. The work reverberated the mobile shifting of attention, the way our eye darts seamlessly from one detail to the next (Madelyn Frank). 'Mobile Views' was shown first in 1998 at Kim Foster Gallery; these photographs influenced photographers in what would later be coined the digital “tilt-shift,” from the mid-2000s on.

In 2000, ‘Fresh Kills’ used the same methodology as 'Mobile Views’ to document New York’s Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island to explore how detritus turns into landscape as we excessively consume, while laying bare questions of reality versus invention and was exhibited and published widely.

‘Arachnoid’ (2002), made on a naturally lit set in Wides’ backyard when she moved to the Hudson Valley, reflects on notions of home after 9/11 utilizing spiders and their webs—"abstraction that looks like a combination of automatic drawing and scientific investigation." (Vince Aletti)

In ‘I, Mannahatta' and 'I, Kaaterskill' (1997 – 2013), Wides’ lens explored nuances in the perceptual in our daily lives. At a time when the virtual may seem to rival the real, Wides locates the poignancy of the desire “to be in our environment, in the heart of the multitude…in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite,” as Baudelaire said about the flâneur. Wides adopts a transformative vision, expressing her intuitive, critical and conceptual responses to our landscape and social environment. Her lens blends her subjects with their surroundings, expressing the interconnectivity of subject and subjectivity, as well as space itself.

These projects document Wides’ perception of place at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, depicting human constructions and human figures interacting with the social, economic, and natural topographical layers of a landscape with complicated and dynamic histories.

In 2012, 'I, Mannahatta' and 'I, Kaaterskill' were featured in Wides’ survey at the Hudson River Museum, accompanied by an 100-page catalogue. The exhibition also included her photographs commissioned by the museum exploring Westchester’s suburban areas, a hinge between Wides’ urban and rural work. As in all of the artist’s work, dialogues between mind and matter, reality and myth, representation and abstraction are present.

Along with the work of ‘Fresh Kills,’ ‘Arachnoid,’ and ‘I, Kaaterskill,’ Wides’s recent works — ‘This: seasons,’ ‘And something happens to the light,’ and ‘Voice of Silence’—are reflections centered on deep environmental considerations in still images, new video projects, and site-responsive installations, both indoors and out. The regenerative potential of the natural world and our inseparability with it manifests in the immersive images encouraging the viewer's contemplation, connection, and care, urging its preservation in this period of profound loss on the planet.

As part of her art practice, Wides is the Curator of ‘T’ Space, a nonprofit woodland gallery dedicated to the cross-inspiration of visual art, poetry, music and architecture in the Hudson Valley. She has curated over 30 exhibitions, including Ai Weiwei, Torkwase Dyson, Carolee Schneemann, Martin Puryear, and Brice Marden along with the accompanying poetry and music programs.







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