Susan Wood built a career out of catching people off guard, in the moment before they remembered to perform for the camera. Now 94, she recently sat down to look through decades of that work, and some of it caught her off guard too.
“There are things I don’t even remember about until this,” she said at her home in Amagansett, flipping through prints and contact sheets from a career that spans roughly 75 years.
The archive is headed to a permanent home. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona announced in April that it had acquired Wood’s collection as part of an expansion that added photography archives to its holdings. The donated materials include prints, negatives, slides, Polaroids, test prints, tear sheets, exhibition posters, postcards, and publications, tracing her work from magazine assignments to film sets.
Wood started her artistic career at New York’s High School of Music and Art, earned her degree at Sarah Lawrence College, and did graduate work at Yale’s School of Art and Architecture. Her parents raised her on the city’s cultural circuit, spending Saturday mornings in artists’ studios or at children’s concerts at Carnegie Hall.
“I was art all the way,” she said.
This grounding in art shaped her once she picked up a camera. Her career took her through the photography lab at Life magazine and on to assignments for Vogue, Look, People, and New York Magazine. She photographed film sets for 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and United Artists, including work on “Easy Rider,” and turned her lens on John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Martha Stewart, and Gloria Steinem. Her 1969 portrait of Lennon and Ono for Look remains one of the images she is best known for.
Susan Wood also worked well outside the world of celebrity portraiture, photographing families, homes, and everyday communities, and reporting on subjects such as medical malpractice and the lives of working women. Journalism and photography developed side by side for her almost from the start.
What she was chasing in front of the camera, she said, was never the easy shot. “I don’t want just smiles. I want the soul,” she said.
Wood admitted that she cannot always explain how she knows when she has gotten the photo. “It just looks fresh. It just looks real,” she said. “There are many times you fail too, when you just can’t get at it.”
The stories behind her photographs make that instinct concrete. Once, photographing playwright Tom Stoppard on the street, she held back rather than interrupt what he was doing, hoping to catch him as he actually was. On other shoots, she used Polaroids to test how light fell across a scene, tearing the prints apart and piecing them back together until the exposure matched from section to section. It was a working method formulated as much on trial and improvisation as on technical skill.
“I just love catching people,” she said. “When I catch them, I don’t just want them unaware, just where I get the spirit. Where the expression actually goes.” The Center for Creative Photography, founded at the University of Arizona in 1975, focuses its collections on such material. Its archives let researchers study a finished photograph alongside the negatives, test prints, and false starts that preceded it. Wood’s collection provides a detailed record of editorial and advertising photography during a period when both the technology and the culture surrounding them shifted dramatically.
Her work has already been acquired by institutions such as the Library of Congress, and Getty Images represents her photography today. She has continued to exhibit in recent years, with a retrospective in Dublin in 2023 and a show at the Laughlin Gallery in 2024.
None of that has slowed her down. She still takes pictures on her phone. She still sails, and still competes. And she still thinks hard about the choices behind an image. Wood has created habits that do not retire along with a career. Asked how someone can live in a moment and document it at the same time, Wood did not treat it as a contradiction to be untangled. “Appreciate the moment and be part of it and capture it,” she said. “Two different things.”
For decades, Wood has been preserving other people’s fleeting moments. Her archive now gives the rest of us a chance to see how she did it.