Susan May Tell is known for her celebrated career in photography—as fine artist, photojournalist and photo editor. Identified by Adorama Pro as a “poet with a camera” she is a highly sought after speaker, portfolio reviewer (including at B&H’s BILD Expo), juror of fine art photography competitions as well as her support of emerging artists.
Tell has been an Artist in Residence at MacDowell, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The Smithsonian Museum has included her work in its Samuel Wagstaff Collection, and Columbia University collected her Oral History and Catalog of Works. Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale; Griffin Museum of Photography; Capital University; and University of California/San Francisco.
Her work was featured in 32 exhibitions since January 2023, including FotoNostrum in Barcelona. It is exhibited in scores of brick-and-mortar galleries coast-to-coast, featured in ARTnews, New York Times, L’Oeil de la Photographie and many other influential publications.
Elizabeth Avedon included her work in “fossils of time + light” — a book she curated and designed for the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography. Malcolm Daniel, then Director in Charge, Photography, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, awarded her First Place for an exhibition he juried and curated for the Barrett Art Center.
During Tell’s exciting 25-year career as a photojournalist her clients included pre-eminent American publications such as the LIFE, TIME, Newsweek and the New York Times; her photos also graced their covers. Tell worked a decade overseas, first as the Middle-East photographer for Marcel Saba’s agencies based in Cairo, then as his European photographer based in Paris. After returning to her hometown, Manhattan, she spent a decade as staff photographer and photo editor for the New York Post. Her stories ran the gamut from the Women Fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Iran-Iraq war, NBA Finals and Egypt’s DEA to heads of state, actors, and celebrities.
Inexorably and irresistibly, Tell was drawn back to photographing personal work.
She is currently working on the odyssey of her FIFTY years of photographs.
More about Susan and her work can be found at https://www.susanmaytell.com/ although neither her photojournalism nor recent project, A Tapestry: Lyrical Nature, are on the site.
Statement:
A quiet, meditative, intuitive photographer, I am drawn to these overlooked, often unnoticed, fragile, details contained in the ordinary. When my eye sees what my heart feels.
My process, when photographing, is to walk around, slowly, led by my camera lens and instincts and stop only when I feel the “so much depends upon” moment. Which is when I click the shutter. That quote is from poet, William Carlos Williams, who may be my greatest artistic inspiration.
This photo, from 1979, is among the thousands my assistant and I are finding as we go through while creating my archive.
Photographs of Space, Silence & Solitude
Adorama Pro: Susan May Tell, Poet with a Camera
New Series – A TAPESTRY: Lyrical Nature
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Artist-in-Residence, MacDowell
Artist-in-Residence, Yaddo
Artist-in-Residence, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,
Italian Street Scene
© Susan May Tell. All Rights Reserved.
