Susan Wides is an American photographic artist whose immersive, abstract works explore an embodied perception in the natural world and the urban environment, transforming these encounters into reflections on presence, impermanence, energy, and care. Her work is made on site and as a single exposure, using variations in focal depth to bring the visual representation of the environment closer to the profound experience of it.

Critic Carter Ratcliff notes, “Wides invites us to come alive to vision as a kind of inventiveness... connecting us to our surroundings and, ultimately, to one another.”

Wides’s work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Hudson River Museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, the Haifa Museum of Art, Galerie Urbi et Orbi (France), the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Norton Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center; the Center for Creative Photography (AZ); the Bronx Museum of the Arts; the International Center of Photography; the Museum of the City of New York; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Wides's public art practice engages the architectural scale and communal function of civic spaces.

'T' SPACE RHINEBECK An Installation: Photographs, Painting, Architecture, Nature. Through April 2026

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS HOUSTON: Color into Light, Works from the Permanent Collection, 2025.

THE HUDSON RIVER MUSEUM: Collection Spotlights: Cityscapes. 2025-26. 11 artists including Jacob Lawrence, Richard Haas, Susan Wides

To view more images from a body of work, please contact the studio.

The Bubble images speak in the language of the lens—light bending, color shifting, edges softening, focus drifting—to reflect how we perceive the urban landscape in motion. By allowing images to blur and then snap into clarity, I embrace the camera’s limits as a way of seeing. Shapes of light hover like bubbles, dissolving and reforming—both precise and fleeting—as our presence in the city moves between rhythm, vitality, and flow.

“Wides’s 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—an ongoing act of imagination.”— New York Magazine