Nighttime Mystery, Yaddo
© Susan May Tell. All Rights Reserved.
Bio:
Susan May Tell has been an Artist in Residence at MacDowell (most recently in November 2025), Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The Smithsonian Museum includes her work in its Samuel Wagstaff Collection, and Columbia University acquired her Oral History and Catalog of Works.
Her photos and reviews of her work have been published in ARTnews, TIME, Newsweek Magazine, The New York Times, and myriad others, domestically and internationally. She was interviewed for Adrorama’s Meet a Pro; the article’s title is “Poet With A Camera”.
She is a winner of PhotoLucida’s Creative Mass 2025 TOP50 and her photos were chosen to promote PhotoLucida’s Creative Mass 2026. Her first solo exhibitions were in 1982 and her photos have appeared in more than 50 exhibitions.
Tell is busy creating an archive of her 50+ years of creating photographs — as she continues to create new work.
Statement:
This photo was taken at Yaddo during my residency there, returning from the nightly communal dinner.
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.
