SUSAN RICHMAN

CREATIVE STATEMENT

The alarming decrease of birds and insects, particularly pollinators, motivated the creation of my Environmental Memento Mori photographs. Inspired by Victorian Memento Mori, photos that exquisitely pose a deceased family member in their finest clothes and surrounded by their favorite objects. I too pose my subjects in an imagined environment. With each photo I explore the juxtaposition between permanence and impermanence and the clash between beauty and the precarious state of our world. I created my Environmental Memento Mori to honor my subjects whose troubling decline makes their recognition important and poignant.

The photographs are produced by layering botanical materials, subjects, and dyes on multiple sheets of glass separated by blocks. The finished assemblage is photographed as one image through all the glass layers simultaneously. The result is an illusion; a fantasy environment that once captured is dismantled and washed away but allows the subject to live on forever.

Susan Richman is a NY artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. Recent US exhibits include ‘2023 Botanical’ Photo Place Gallery, Middlebury, VT, ‘The Still Life’ Praxis Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. ‘Art Of NY’ Arkell Museum Canajoharie, NY. Publications include International Color Photographer of the Year, Winners Book and Creative Quarterly;100 Best Photos Annual, 2022 (published in 2023). Prior to Covid, she was an educator at The International Center for Photographers in NYC.