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- Where the Shore Begins
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- Held in Motion
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- What the Surface Keeps
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- What Remains Expand
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- A Quiet Reflection
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- The Edge of Stillness
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- Sea Threads
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- The Field’s Descent
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- The Rising Path
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- Along the Ridge
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- Silence Settles
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- Surface Gives Way
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- Tidal Remnants
Susan Collins
Second Nature
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
“Imagine a traveler moving along a mountain path, eyes fixed on the stone and soil beneath her feet. Focused on the next step, she misses the vast, shimmering lake that has been sitting just to her left all along. I have been this traveler, photographing the scene while failing to see the deeper content.
My photographs are an invitation to pay deeper attention to the textures and contexts of the world we see. Starting with horses, and proceeding to other animals, I found textures to embed in my landscape photographs. At first glance, they are the landscape. The close viewer discovers the horse’s hair or the sheep’s wool and is invited to pay the same attention to all the different parts of the image.
This body of work began when my gaze lifted. By looking beyond the obvious subject, a new visual language emerged—one where the rugged grain of a mountain peak reveals a quiet kinship with the lines of an animal’s coat or the structure of a feather. In the studio, these connections are refined through digital layering, collapsing the distance between horizon and texture and allowing the presence of the animal to inhabit the land. This layered perspective creates a “second nature”—a hidden wildness that only reveals itself once we truly stop to look.”
Artist Bio
Susan Collins’ photographic work brings together landscape, architectural space, and animal forms through images that invite delayed recognition. Her photographs often begin as familiar scenes—a horizon, a line, a shift of light—then gradually reveal themselves, asking the viewer to pause before fully understanding what they are seeing. Discovery unfolds over time.
Collins’ perspective is shaped by experience. She has spent over a decade running a women’s travel group, developing a sensitivity to how people encounter place and what holds their attention. A background in historical restoration informs her approach to structure, proportion, and visual balance, grounding the work in intention and craft.