Sue Abramson likes to get down and dirty, sometimes crawling on her belly for the best weird angle into the natural world. She’s been wryly observing nature for four decades using a variety of cameras and methods that illuminate the roots, veins, and soil in Pittsburgh, PA, including her own garden.
It isn’t just about plants. Abramson’s photography also explores the process of grief and grieving. Her 2018 exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, The Only Constant is Change, includes garden work made in response to a life in transition. Abramson’s book, A Woodlands Journal, is a decades-long photographic meditation on her evolving relationship with light, loss, chaos, and place.
Head of its Photography program for 20 years, Sue worked as an associate professor at Pittsburgh Filmmakers for 30 years. She has exhibited at Phipps Conservatory, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art, Miller Institute of Art, and at the Ilon Gallery in New York City.
Art critic Mary Thomas writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called her work “simultaneously confident and humble, assertive and demure…. [Abramson’s] commitment and close observation have resulted in a honed body of work in which the superfluous is eliminated to produce compositions that project beauty and not a little mystery through subjects that are often dismissed as mundane.”