Photographers

Susan B. Anthony (born 1940 in Brooklyn, New York) is an acclaimed contemporary American fine-art photographer, painter, and educator celebrated for her intimate, long-form documentary essays focusing on industrial communities and architectural decay. Raised in New York City, Anthony pursued a comprehensive multidisciplinary arts education, graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art before completing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Fine Arts and Art Therapy from New York University. For several decades, she maintained a dedicated career as a painter, printmaker, and art educator within public schools, while also working within major art publications like Art in America and ARTnews. Her creative path shifted profoundly when she inherited a vintage Hasselblad camera, recognizing the mechanical eye as the perfect medium to expand her interest in geometric composition, texture, and urban archaeology.

Anthony achieved significant critical and institutional acclaim with her monumental decade-long visual survey tracking the socioeconomic landscape of upstate New York, culminating in her landmark debut monograph, Collar City: A Photographic Portrait of Troy, New York. Moving between Manhattan and her secondary home in Columbia County, she embedded her lens within the historic city of Troy, once a thriving nineteenth-century center for iron, brick, and shirt collar manufacturing. Utilizing her traditional Hasselblad film setup alongside sharp Canon digital frameworks, her photographs systematically capture the stark contrasts of the post-industrial town, juxtaposing graffiti-covered, decaying factory facades with grand 19th-century mansions featuring colorful Tiffany glass windows. Bypassing commercial and detached journalistic tropes, her environmental views and candid street portraits serve as an empathetic, humanistic tribute to the residents who preserve and restore the community against a backdrop of industrial decline.

Operating across portrait critique, visual ethnography, and material sociology, Anthony has consistently brought her local documentations to prominent metropolitan art audiences. Her continuous artistic practice extended into the mid-2020s through successive standalone features and print exhibitions. Her prolific Troy series has been showcased across high-profile regional galleries and alternative institutions, including solo exhibitions at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, mass exhibitions at Collar Works Gallery, and competitive prize selections at the Baxter Street Gallery and Station Independent Project. Her master vintage color and silver-gelatin prints are highly sought after by regional collectors and historical registries documenting the physical erosion, architecture, and changing identities of the American municipal landscape.