© Susan May Tell. All Rights Reserved.
The American Landscape-SxSE-Juror Nancy McCrary-May 25 2026
50 years of photographs = my taking and living 50 years of creating photographs
Great quote of Claude Monet: “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” — Claude Monet
Imagist poetry is my artistic inspiration.
I am an intermediary between people and the world in which they live.
My personal photographs are poems that don’t need meaning or require explanation. Just as every poem is about poetry, a successful photograph has to be about photography. Form and feeling. Not one or the other. It’s the tension between them, each simultaneously vying for attention. That tension gives the image a life of its own. It’s not about anything. It IS.
My photographs convey what I see and experience at a specific moment in time. I don’t go out looking for things to photograph. To questions about my creative intent, I am comfortable saying I took the picture because “my finger clicked.” It’s like Bob Dylan’s memorable line, ‘…and you know something’s happening. But you don’t know what it is…”
MY photographs happen when something I am experiencing is just right and, like a magnet, there’s an irresistible force that tells me, ‘Take
Whatever is out there is out there and what you do with it is what you do with it. As Wallace Stevens’, in one of his adagio, wrote: “The real is only the base. But it is the base.”
The Smithsonian Museum includes her work in its Samuel Wagstaff Collection, and Columbia University acquired her Oral History and Catalog of Works for its Center for Digital Research and Scholarship.
Photographs of Space, Silence & Solitude
Adorama Pro: Susan May Tell, Poet with a Camera
New Series – A TAPESTRY: Lyrical Nature
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