Suzanne Opton

“I simply wanted to look in the face of someone who’d seen something unforgettable,” the photographer Suzanne Opton says of the extraordinary portraits she made of American soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Opton asked her subjects, all of whom were stationed at New York’s Fort Drum between tours of duty in 2004 and 2005, to rest their heads on a table, and she photographed their horizontal faces up close, so that they nearly fill the frame. The posture is vulnerable and startlingly intimate, as if these young men and women were facing someone in bed or on a stretcher, and the results are riveting. Opton catches soldiers both on guard and off, looking out and looking inward simultaneously, and we can only imagine what they’re thinking, what they’ve done, and what they dread. The group of large color prints that go up at Peter Hay Halpert’s new Chelsea gallery next week give these heads a monumental, sculptural presence, but they never feel bombastic or preachy, only heartbreaking. Dispensing with theatrics, Opton finds genuine drama. If these people have seen something unforgettable, so have we. in The New Yorker by Vicent Aletti

Suzanne Opton's work has been exhibited internationally, and is featured in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris; the Musée de’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has received grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Opton’s work has appeared in a variety of publications including Orion, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and Fortune. Opton teaches at the International Center of Photography and the Cooper Union. She participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in September 2005. Her work can be seen at www.suzanneopton.com