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.

Waxworld (1983-1990) uses the question of where reality ends and illusion begins—a subject inherent in waxwork displays—as a starting point for exploring human interactions in both public and private spheres. In photographing these uncanny and claustrophobic displays, packed with the iconography of a popular culture fascinated with its own decline, I saw an unsettling spectacle of myth, history, and recent headlines. As relics of a time past, the wax figures also seemed to reflect a forceful refusal of death, a quality shared with photography.

The series is, in part, a response to these often misogynist distortions—a refictionalizing of the subjects that removes them yet further from their origins. In doing so, I create new visual artifacts, producing worlds for the viewer to sort out.