Touchstone Laramie 2025 from Susan Moldenhauer

Home Place and Reflections

For Touchstone Laramie 2025, I am presenting new work from two series, Home Place and Reflections. Home Place draws on my 40-year collaboration with Pennsylvania photographer Jennifer Anne Tucker. Together, we have explored image-making using fabrics, being photographers and models for each other, and creating cloudscape visual dialogues in response to our Pennsylvania and Wyoming locations. Home Place turns away from cloud work to create images from within our homes. The series solidified when Bob and I visited Jennifer and her husband, Gerald Lang, my photography professor in Graduate School, in the summer of 2024. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was honoring them for their gift of 19th and 20th-century photographs. A few days were spent at their farm in Centre County, where Jenny and I photographed with poet Abby Miller. In September of this year, we returned to State College for the reception of an alumni exhibition at PSU’s School of Visual Arts, which included one of my images. A few more days were spent photographing with Abby and two more women, Bethany and Juliet.

 

Reflections is another approach to photographing that Jenny and I have explored on and off over the last few years. I decided to explore Laramie’s downtown area this way, having lived here for over 30 years. I began using self-reflections in Laramie’s storefront windows, an idea that is evolving into how Laramie expresses itself through its vernacular architecture, western iconography, and Old West mythology. I am interested in the complexity of the reflected image, making order from the complicated scenarios one encounters on the street, and creating new narratives through this familiar location.

 

About the Artist

 

Susan Moldenhauer has a 40-year career as a fine art photographer. She has a national exhibition record, is represented in numerous public collections, and has self-published books, including those in the creative partnership, Sequencing Through Time and Place, with artist Wendy Bredehoft and dancer/choreographer Margaret Wilson. In 2017, she transitioned to her full-time studio practice, following administrative / curatorial positions at the Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA (1986-1991), and the University of Wyoming Art Museum (1991-2017). She is a community advocate for artists and co-founded Touchstone Laramie, Laramie Mural Project, and Laramie Public Art Coalition. She is a recipient of a 2016 and 2023 Wyoming Artist Fellowship; in 2017, she won a Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award. In 2023, she was invited into Photo Pensato, a photography collective based in Denver, CO.