Kathy Sherman suder

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Kathy Sherman Suder trained as a painter before deciding, with the encouragement of Eikoh Hosoe and Ralph Gibson, to shift to photography. Her first major series of work on boxers, Knockout, maneuvered a subject of bar room masculinity into an aesthetic and emotional realm of dramatic silhouettes, intense color and violent action. Blurring the boundaries of figuration, landscape and abstraction, these “color-saturated pictures of boxers”, as The New Yorker remarked, “owe more to Caravaggio than to Sports Illustrated". Exhibited in Fort Worth, New York, and at Paris Photo, Knockout marked Suder’s arrival on the U.S. art scene as an image maker of unusual emotional and visual power.


Suder’s later series of work have chronicled the street life and domesticity of Paris, Havana, Morocco and Coney Island; a medical mission in Guatemala; religious festivals in Sicily; portraits of breast cancer survivors; and life on the Subway in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. Diverse as these contexts are, Suder’s images maintain a sensitivity to subjects in extremes of physical, emotional and social tension. She especially latches onto moments of vulnerability and, in Underground, creates encounters that make her an active participant in her images. The psychological and graphic power of the work is reinforced by its significant scale, dramatic lighting and vivid color.


Kathy Suder’s work has been included in three thematic museum exhibitions in the United States and is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Underground at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Acquired by a number of major private collectors, her photographs are also in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum and the Miami Art Museum.