Susan May Tell’s work has been called haunting, powerful and elegiac. She is a poet with a camera. A highly sought after speaker, portfolio reviewer and juror of fine art photography competitions, Tell is known in the photography community for her celebrated 50-year career in photography—both fine art and journalistic—as well as her support of emerging artists.
An Artist in Residence at MacDowell, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Smithsonian Museum includes 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; University of California/San Francisco; Schumacher Gallery/Capital University; and Avenue B Gallery.
Scores of brick-and-mortar galleries coast-to-coast exhibit her work. Her work is currently on view at Gallery 811, the Stanton Street Projects and View Art Center in Old Forge, all in New York. It is also currently being shown at the Christopher Art Gallery, Prairie State College in Illinois and the SouthEast Center for Photography in South Carolina. Tell’s work has gratefully been included in several previous exhibitions at South [x] SouthEast Gallery, including its most recent — Where We Live. It was also recently exhibited at AQUA Art Miami.
Tell’s photographs have been featured in ARTnews, New York Times, L’Oeil de la Photographie among 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 awarded her First Place for an exhibition he curated for the Barrett Art Center. Recent online presentations include the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Jewish Art Salon and Projections Live curated by Frank Meo.
Tell also had a celebrated 25-year career as a photojournalist, working for pre-eminent publications such as the New York Times, Time and LIFE Magazines. She spent a decade overseas, based in Cairo and Paris. Her stories include the women fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, Iran-Iraq war, NBA Finals, actors, politicians, and more. She spent an amazing decade as a staff photographer and photo editor for her hometown, in-your-face, newspaper, the New York Post, before being inexorably and irresistibly drawn back to focusing on her personal work.
More about Susan and her work can be found at https://www.susanmaytell.com/
Equipment: SONY RX100-VII and Leica M6 rangefinder camera with a 35mm f2 Summicron lens