Susan Moldenhauer "Insignia"

I am Susan Moldenhauer. I live in Laramie, WY, a small, culturally diverse university town on the high plains of southeast Wyoming, surrounded by mountains with dramatic weather and ever-changing light and clouds. As a Midwesterner who had only lived east of the Mississippi, I moved to Laramie, sight unseen, excited to begin a new position at the University of Wyoming Art Museum and experience life in the American West.

Insignia is from an ongoing series of photographs I began a few years ago, inspired by a curiosity about self-reflection as a pictorial idea and an interest in what I might do photographically with Laramie, a subject I have quietly observed for more than 30 years.

My approach to image-making is an accumulation of methods I have adopted over time— composing in the camera at the time of exposure, processing my digital captures in Photoshop to transform color images into black-and-white, and making tonal adjustments, such as the darkroom techniques of dodging and burning. My lyrical, emotive imagery from place-based explorations synthesizes light, darkness, movement, and moment.

I have used my presence in images in several ways over the years, interjecting my hand or shadow into landscapes, performing with fabrics in front of the camera lens, and, more recently, considering using my reflections in picture glass or windowpanes.

What started as an exploration of myself in this place began to speak more about Laramie than my presence in it—its history, vernacular architecture, western iconography, and mythology. The images are visually complex, creating interior and exterior perspectives simultaneously, and new relationships between time and place.

What you see in Insignia is my silhouette and the adjacent shadow, revealing the interior view of a sporting goods store. The historic Albany Mutual Building Association (1887) across the street behind me is majestic in its reflection in the storefront glass. The juxtaposition of the old with contemporary mountain bikes and snowboards compels the eye to move around and through the picture. As a photographer friend of mine said, “It is the human becoming the mechanical constructions we have created, and we are disappearing shadows of our own inventions!”