Susan Middleton Art

Art Brokerage: (born 1948) Susan Middleton is a photographer specializing in portraits of animals and plants. She was born in 1948 and holds a BA in sociology with a minor in art from Santa Clara University, California. She apprenticed in photography by working as an assistant to Richard Avedon. Middleton chaired the department of photography of the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, from 1982 to 1995. In 2006 she produced a thirty-minute documentary film focusing on animals and plants of the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. She has been photographing rare and endangered species since 1986, and her work, with collaborator David Liittschwager, is collected in four books, two published by National Geographic Books and two by Chronicle Books. The working process developed by Middleton and Liittschwager is documented in an Emmy Award–winning National Geographic television special America’s Endangered Species: Don’t Say Goodbye, 1997. A book of Middleton’s photographs with text by Mary Ellen Hannibal, Evidence of Evolution: Darwin’s Cabinet of Curiosities was published by Abrams in September, 2009. In pursuing her work, Middleton has traveled across the United States and has lived for extended periods in Africa and Hawaii. She is a certified diver and has accompanied scientific oceanographic expeditions. She generally isolates animals and plants in studio-style settings with plain backdrops, constructing what she calls “mini-studios” for live creatures photographed in the field. Biologist Edward O. Wilson has commented that “[her] remarkable portraits speak to the heart. In the end, their kind of testimony may count as much toward conserving life as all the data and generalizations of science.”