Susan Hacker Stang is an American photographer, author, and educator. She retired in 2015 after forty-one years as professor of communications at Webster University in St. Louis. Her work has been collected by more than 25 major museums and libraries around the world and appears in numerous books and magazines.
Susan Hacker Stang photograph by Sam Stang
Stang's photography characteristically employs alternative cameras (such as the Olympus Pen-FT half-frame camera, the Kodak Brownie, the Holga, Holga Digital and the JOCO VX5), or alternative techniques (such as Polaroid emulsion transfer).
Stang majored in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned both a BFA (1971) and MFA (1974), studying under photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. In 1971 she re-located for one year to London where she worked as a photographer for the cutting-edge British fashion magazine NOVA. In 1974 she joined the faculty of Webster University in St. Louis, where she helped found and build the photographic studies program in the School of Communications. For several years she taught during the summer at The Darkroom in Florence, Italy.
In 2007 she published a book of Polaroid emulsion transfers, Encountering Florence/Firenze un Incontro. The book’s bi-lingual text presents accompanying word-portraits from well-known authors in their own encounters with the city.
Kodachrome – End of the Run: Photographs from the Final Batches, co-edited by Stang (2011), features photographs from among the final rolls of Kodachrome ever processed. In 2012, she curated a set of notecards for Chronicle Books, Kodachrome Notes, another selection of images from those historic final batches.
In 2016, she published a slip-covered limited edition book entitled reAPPEARANCES. The book is a sequence of fifty-two photographs that takes the viewer on a journey through the uncanny coherence of the look of the world. The series reAPPEARANCES was made using her JOCO, a toy digital camera made for a short period in Singapore.
Stang continues to shoot with toy digital cameras. A recent series shot in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru expresses the mythic and the sacred quality of these Incan remains. Her latest series, Resonance, evokes the mysterious quality of the world around us, as toy cameras are so good at doing.
In 2023, she relocated to Norwalk, Connecticut.
Contact information: stang.susan@gmail.com