Suzanne Opton

September 2005

Portrait photographer Suzanne Opton has approached many subject matters from unusual angles. In her images, CEOs leap onto tables, female bodies wrap around household objects and brothers stand proudly in a twisted landscape. Her newest series Soldier reflect a curiosity about the military at a time of war. As she describes, “It is not sensationalism I am after. I am after the human being.” She has had the opportunity to photograph around seventy soldiers who recently returned from their tour of duty in Iraq. The series includes two parts. The first is a group of formal black-and-white portraits. The second part is a group of closely cropped photographs showing only the soldiers’ heads laying on a flat surface.

Since arriving at Light Work Suzanne has scanned many 4×5″ negatives from the series and is currently experimenting with large format printing of the head images. She also hopes to continue photographing soldiers for a third part of the series.

Suzanne Opton’s work has been exhibited worldwide and has appeared in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her series of nudes, Loose Change, is the subject of a chapter in Vicki Goldberg’s newest book, Light Matters (Aperture, 2005). Suzanne lives and works in New York City.

www.suzanneopton.com