'Choosing angles that challenge gravity, Susan Wides inserts an unnerving, emotional component in her large, dramatic images of fire-damaged pine forest in Westhampton. The altered perspective lends unexpected majesty to the eerie black forms, making them seem formidable against an artificial, nearly sold backdrop of blue or red. There is much to admire, too, in mystical lighting that places dancing dots or illumination on the undergrowth and makes trees appear to echo themselves as multiple shadows.'

--Phyliis Braff ('The New York Times,' Sunday May 2, 1999)


'In and out of focus, concrete and ephemeral, Susan Wides's 'Mannahatta' photographs are seductive and strange. Are we looking at a real city, a collage, or a model maker's creation? These views of Manhattan work against one's expectation of the cityscape, yet capture the essence of a sensual encounter with the density and physical space of the city. Wides manipulates her view camera's focus and depth of field to create a plane of clarity in an otherwise indistinct scene, producing an image both unsettling and alluring. We recognize something familiar in the ambiguity, this blend of sharpness and blur, like a dream on the edge of memory. And the quality of light, diffuse and tentative, even on sunlit streets, adds to this ungrounded, fluid sensation. The effect is disarming and draws the viewer through the picture plane into the image. Then we find that the photographer has conveyed us to not one, but two destinations: the city's streets and the mind's eye. This is not transformation, but transmission, the photograph not as metaphor, but experience.'

-- Bob Shamis, ('On viewing the city of Mannahatta,' October, 2007)


'Her photographs are fluid rather than static; Her lens swings, tilts and pans, giving the images a dynamism that they share with the city they capture, itself an ongoing act of imagination.'

-- Christopher Bonanos ('New York Magazine,' January 2006)


Susan Wides even manages to see the Flatiron Building with a fresh eye by paying off-kilter homage to Stieglitz and Steichen. Both of them photographed, memorably, the building's majestic triangular prow seen through a bare-branched tree. Wides represents the Flatiron in strict and nearly rectangular profile, in color, tilting crazily above a scraggly clump of trees.'

--Vicki Goldberg ('The New York Times,' August 25, 2000)


'Whose cars are these anyway? And how did they arrive at this seemingly final resting spot? Any of them might just as well have been mine or yours. A landscape speckled with human debris is our communal creation. We see such imagery in terms of a contrast of nature to culture. But the strange use of focus in Hudson Valley Landscape 10.15.04 transforms the foliage and the automobiles into a unified scene, brought together by a puzzle-like or even cubist-like fragmentation of individual parts (contrast as paradox.) [..] As her interest in the two postcards I just described intimates, Wides sees our world as deeply rooted in history. Art history is a subset of the history on which she reflects. Her Hudson River landscapes pay direct homage to the eponymous nineteenth-century painters whose work she has carefully researched in recent years. Yet Wides' approach to history as constantly in a state of being born and dying, is perhaps closest in spirit not to any painter (or photographer), but to the Earthworks artist, Robert Smithson, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s was obsessed with the interdependence of these extremes of existence. Smithson, like Wides, paid special attention to why certain landscapes are noticed while other ones are ignored. Indeed, for Smithson, careful looking constituted art in and of itself. The complex relationship of mind to matter is another concern Wides shares with Smithson.

-- Reva Wolf ('Focus, Contrast, History: Susan Wides and the Cultural Landscape,' June 2006)


'Kaaterskill, a kind of homage to the Hudson River Valley, preserves some of the old nature/culture opposition, but most of the photographs take us deeper into the woods, where the action really shifts to us. The stasis and flow are not so much features of a landscape as they are the inner movements we experience in a rich, dense place we don't know and hasn't yet become visual wallpaper. There's panic, here, and preternatural composure. Unlike Thomas Struth's recent landscapes, whose scope and detail are inassimilable and force us into a contemplative, not to say analytical stance, 'Kaaterskill' draws us into an experience. These photographs may not reproduce Wides' encounter with nature, but they occasion or provoke a parallel encounter, one that puts us in the picture.'

-- Lyle Rexer ('Susan Wides: Alive and Looking,' September 2005)


'Through brightly colored fall foliage, a heap of rusted cars is shown glistening in the hazy autumn light. The work manages to convey its own kind of post-Romantic, post-industrial reverie. [..] Sometimes, the heightened color and exaggerated perspectives in Wides' photos appear digitally altered or manipulated in the darkroom in some way. However, in this series, as in her earlier series of spider webs, flocks of birds and urban scenes, she achieves unusual effects by simply manipulating a 4-by-5 view camera with a movable lens. By tilting the lens and swinging the camera in dramatic panning motions, she captures extraordinary distortions of depth, light and color that lend each of her works a dreamlike poetic quality, quite far removed from the often prosaic source material [..] Hudson River Landscape 10.23.04 is a lush and luminous picture showing extremely out-of-focus yellow leaves in the foreground that cover much of the photo's surface in hazy pools of flat brilliant color. Visible only in peripheral interludes here and there are connecting streams of cascading water rushing over rocky terrain, from trickling rivulets to a small waterfall, all in ultra-sharp focus. The piece nevertheless verges on abstraction, and, with its play of light, color and texture that recalls a Color Field composition is perhaps as close to painting as any photograph is ever likely to be.'

-- David Ebony ('Art in America,' June/July 2005)


Susan Wides' large photographic images feature the same Hudson Valley area that inspired the 19th-century Hudson River School painters. Many done from her home and near the home of Thomas Cole, its founder, are highly reminiscent of the Hudson River School, seeming more painterly than photographic yet having an inspired poetic sense.

-- Neil Trager (Former Director, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art)


'Vision had always been the central theme in work of Susan Wides. Seeing oneself see isn't the easiest thing to do, but Wides' photographs provide the plausible illusion that we are watching her see the world through a network of continually shifting visions codified by the camera. [..] These photographs mingle tension, exhaustion, and irony with energetic wonder and vivid fascination in proportions which acknowledge both the state of the city today, and the insistent subjectivity of the artist's vision. [..] These photographs also suggest another paradox: privacy amidst the crowded streets, the privacy of one individual's uniquely subjective vision, distinct amidst the surrounding crowd. Through this artist's eyes, we see not just the city but vision itself.'

-- Ellen Handy ('Eyes on the City: Susan Wides and the Perception of Perception,' November 2000)


'Susan Wides' photographs render the sleek surfaces and bright lights of Manhattan as a series of disorienting glimpses. By allowing her images to 'go soft' at the edges and to lose sharpness of a singular focus, she welcomes the camera's objective failures. The results are both precise and painterly; a general sense of the landscape is set up and then in certain places it snaps into clear focus. The photographs are part of a series Wides calls 'The Bubble,' referring to both the glassy, distorted reflections on the surface of a bubble, but also to the fragile and disorienting economic 'bubble' of New York City. The images convey the atmosphere of city life, its conditions of light, movement and the divided attention that urban existence demands.'

-- J. Abbott Miller, ('2wice,' Vol.6 No.2, 2003)


'Susan Wides has extended her 'Mobile Views' series with a group of epic landscapes made at New York City's infamous Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island, the locus of all that is discarded by the city. An austere expanse of refuse becoming landscape, detritus turning into earth, evidence of consumption undergoing transformation into a version of nature, it is a remarkable place and an apt landscape subject for our time. Wides sees it freshly, with the quirkily lyrical sensibility she brings to all things [..] Throughout her work, referents cycle in and out of recognition, and questions of reality versus invention introduce themselves. The 'real world' she photographs actually exists only within her finished prints and (perhaps) fleeting on her own retinas, since it is one that cannot exist without the essential mediation of perception. If a tree falls in the forest and Susan Wides isn't there to see it, it can't be pictured.'

--Ellen Handy ('Camerawork,' Fall/Winter 2001)


'With a great-grandmother (and three great-aunts) who were enmeshed in Manhattan's progressive artistic scene of the early 20th century, Susan Wides was almost bound to become an artist. Yet she was raised in conservative Cincinnati, the town that arrested its museum director for exhibiting controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe back in the 1980s. Such a background, it seems, has set the pattern for her work in photography, which regularly oscillates in the attempt to reconcile opposites -- past and present, reality and myth. This dynamic even extends to her personal life, as she divides her time between an apartment in New York City and a house in rural Catskill.'

-- Beth E. Wilson ('Chronogram,' December 2007)


"Over the past 12 years, Susan Wides has directed her camera toward two types of display, both located at the byways of mass entertainment: those of wax museums and of botanical gardens. Like Alice in 'Looking Glass (1987)' -- a larger-than-life photograph that sets the stage for the exhibit -- viewers of Wides' work step into a new world where preconceived notions about the boundaries between fabricated and real become as mutable as a flower, and as malleable as wax."

--Marietta Abrams (Kim Foster Gallery, New York, 1996)


Susan Wides's project is to "learn" from the complexity and contradictions of the vernacular -- wax museums. The selection included is about the construction of the self. Often slightly out of focus, the framing tight and elliptical, these color photographs re-fictionalize the illusion by which fairy tales, myth, and popular culture depict personality and gender roles. Wax dummies of fictional characters played by celluloid stars who perform in viewers' personal fantasies of immortality, all, somehow, made un-hyperreal by the illusion of photographic reproduction send the viewer into a Borgesian tailspin of simulacra-vertigo.

-- Sam Samore & Steve Dietz ('Suitable for Display: Museum/Spectacle/History' exhibition essay)


'Far more bizarre are Susan Wides's pictures of famous folk like Fred and Ginger or Shirley Temple replicated in three dimensions. Picasso, looking pretty much like himself, stands next to two stubby, three-dimensional nudes that have somehow stepped our of one of his 1906 paintings. Does he like them so three-dimensional?

The lighting is odd, and if you didn't know that the setting was a wax museum -- hallowed hall of kitsch, idolatry and slightly creepy likenesses -- you could think this was the real Picasso (whatever that is) and be baffled to find him with these Jeff Koons versions of his art. This image illustrates an unsuspected complexity of wax museums: if Picasso is modeled on a photograph and the nudes on a painting, which is more real, which more fake?'

--Vicki Goldberg (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 'How to Warm a Post-Modernist's Heart')


'Using the strategies of documentary street photography, Wides photographs wax museums. By tightly framing these already strange tableaus, she reveals layers and incongruities their designers never intended.

A scene of Walt Disney drawing Mickey Mouse, for instance, becomes a collage of images in which cartoons, paintings, plaster busts, shadows and Disney's own wax figure become a strange stew of icons. A similar effect occurs as Little Orphan Annie stands among huge, sinister-looking toy animals or as Picasso poses with three D versions of his "Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon."

The work of Ross and Wides poses the ease with which society mixes myth, history and fantasy. But what makes their pictures more disturbing -- and more powerful photography -- is that the worlds they portray exist outside their studios. Like Edgerton, they point to 'just the facts." And, though their facts are fakes, they still arrive at essential truths.'

-- Randy Gragg ('Just the Facts', The Sunday Oregonian)