Portfolio: Susan Wides

by Beth E. Wilson, November 26, 2007

With a great-grandmother (and three great-aunts) who were enmeshed in Manhattan’s progressive artistic scene of the early 20th century, Susan Wides was almost bound to become an artist. Yet she was raised in conservative Cincinnati, the town that arrested its museum director for exhibiting controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe back in the 1980s. Such a background, it seems, has set the pattern for her work in photography, which regularly oscillates in the attempt to reconcile opposites—past and present, duplicity and authenticity, reality and myth. This dynamic even extends to her personal life, as she divides her time between an apartment in New York City and a house in rural Catskill.

Through December 15, Wides is showing her latest series of photographs, “Mannahatta,” at the Kim Foster Gallery in Chelsea. Focusing on views of the city, often from rooftops, these images have been described in
New York magazine, where a number of them first appeared, as “fluid rather than static; her lens swings, tilts and pans, giving the images a dynamism that they share with the city they capture, itself an ongoing act of imagination.”
Portfolio: www.kimfostergallery.com