Susan Derges British, b. 1955

Susan Derges (b. 1955, London) is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential photographers of her generation. Working at the intersection of art, science, and the natural world, Derges has spent over four decades developing a singular practice that explores the relationship between the observer and the observed, the visible and the invisible, and the boundaries between human consciousness and the natural environment.

 

Central to Derges' practice is an enduring fascination with transformation and the hidden processes that shape the physical world. Her work seeks to make visible phenomena that ordinarily remain beyond direct perception, from the vibration of sound and the cycles of the moon to the growth of organic forms and the movement of water. Through this investigation, Derges creates visual metaphors that bridge scientific enquiry and poetic experience, positioning nature not simply as subject matter but as an active collaborator in the production of the image.

 

Distinguished by her pioneering use of cameraless photographic processes, Derges has continually expanded the possibilities of the photographic medium. Her practice encompasses analogue, digital, and experimental techniques, often combining elements of landscape, abstraction, biology, astronomy, and environmental science. She is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking river works, in which sheets of photographic paper are immersed directly into rivers and shorelines, often at night, and exposed using moonlight and hand-held sources of illumination. These works collapse the distinction between image and event, allowing natural processes themselves to become agents of photographic creation.

 

As the curator and historian Martin Barnes has observed, Derges' work engages with "transformative themes" through an exploration of the elemental forces of earth, water, air, and fire. Her images propose a holistic understanding of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, operating through metaphor while retaining a profound sensitivity to physical process. Much like the traditions of alchemy to which her work is often compared, Derges' practice occupies the space between the material and the metaphysical, the particular and the universal.

 

More than twenty years after initiating her celebrated river works, Derges returned to a body of previously unseen material created under the unstable and unpredictable conditions of working directly within the landscape. Advances in imaging technology enabled her to revisit, restore, and transform these photographs into the River Taw & Streamsseries, producing intimate works that preserve the immediacy and contingency of their original creation while inviting renewed contemplation of humanity's place within natural systems.

 

Similarly, her Ocean Flowers series (2019) examines the intricate forms of marine algae suspended within intertidal ecosystems. These works possess an extraordinary delicacy, exploring themes of memory, transience, ecological vulnerability, and the fragile equilibrium of the natural world. Through their luminous and immersive qualities, they invite reflection upon both the beauty and precarity of these environments.

 

In Of Many Lives and Many Seasons (2023), Derges turned her attention to the growth cycles of oak saplings. Beginning with forty acorns germinated in glass vessels within her studio, she documented their development over the course of a year, digitally combining the resulting images into increasingly complex branching structures. The resulting works meditate upon emergence, multiplicity, and the archetypal significance of natural forms, exploring what Derges describes as the "central mystery of life emerging from a singularity into multiplicity."

 

Her series Mortal Moon, exhibited at the Queen's House, Greenwich in 2019-20, further demonstrates the breadth of her conceptual enquiry. Created in response to the Armada Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, these photographs examine the relationship between celestial navigation, maritime exploration, empire, and collective memory. Combining nocturnal images of water, reflections of celestial bodies, and mythological constellations, the works construct a powerful allegory linking historical voyages of exploration and conquest to contemporary narratives of migration, displacement, and human vulnerability.

 

Derges completed her postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art before undertaking further research at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. She currently serves as Visiting Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth. In recognition of her extraordinary contribution to the medium, she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 2025.

 

Her work has been exhibited internationally in landmark exhibitions including Shadows on the Wall: Cameraless Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Shadow Catchers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Today, her works are held in many of the world's leading public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.