Steidlville

Amid the cacophony of today’s young American photographers, it is increasingly rare to hear a voice that stands out for its silence. Such is the case with Susan Paulsen, whose work invests banal quotidian situations with a quiet poetic intensity: tomatoes ripening on a porch, cats sitting by a screen door staring out at nothing, laundry drying on a line, moving like agitated ghosts in the wind. Like tiny gems, Susan Paulsen’s small, lyrical photographs glimmer with a silvery luminosity, drawing us inward to a private, dreamlike world.
Her work perpetuates a certain tradition in American photography, from Robert Frank’s melancholic views to Harry Callahan’s highly personal snapshots of his wife and daughter. Like Callahan, Paulsen employs restricted, personal means to translate her emotions using evocative visual situations.