[By By Kathryn R. Burke | Montrose Mirror | August 9, 2024]

Susan Humphrey photographs western landscapes, lifestyles, and wildlife. Her work is unique because of who she is, how she grew up, and where she’s been throughout her life.

Her work glows. When you walk into a room where her photographs are displayed, you know they are hers right away. Light seems to emanate from every picture, filling the room, shining right at you, inviting you into a special place she discovered in her journeys and is now sharing with you. “That’s a Susan Humphrey photo!” you say.

So where does the glow come from? How does she make you see it? Was she born with the photographer’s eye? How did she learn to “see” this way and transmit her visual experience?

Maybe back on the family ranch. She was raised on the Sanburg Hereford Ranch in Boswick Park, established in 1907 by her great grandfather and now, permanently protected and preserved as part of the Black Canyon National Park. Growing up, she was immersed in the Western lifestyle and surrounded by  a western landscape.

Perhaps from her years in the outfitting business with her husband, Dan, her high school sweetheart and now husband of 52 years. Their endeavors and adventures provided ample opportunity to study wildlife up close.

Likely in the car, with her husband driving and her camera in her lap. Humphrey traveled the west—Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah—as a district coordinator for regional City Market Stores, and experienced parts of the west that differ greatly in geography, typography, heritage, and history.

Definitely after she retired from her corporate job. The Humphreys kept on traveling, exploring more of the west. She was seeing, photographing, absorbing what she saw. For her, it was and still is an emotional as well as a visual experience. She looked, she was awed, and she took pictures. Lots of pictures.

“I saw amazing things,” she says, “things I had only imagined, maybe viewed at a great distance, or never knew existed. Like Shiprock in New Mexico. All those edges and sunset colors. Bighorn sheep in Colorado—illusive and  difficult to capture with a camera, but so worth the effort when you succeed.” (Which she did.) “Or snow-capped mountain ranges, once distant, now we’re driving through them. (And sometimes dangerous to travel in heavy snow, but always beautiful.) Endless hayfields—raised on a ranch, I’d always seen them up close, but our land was bumpier, and those tall mountains were in the far distance. Here, in parts of Wyoming, where it was flat, the fields seemed to stretch into infinity. Everywhere we went, I experienced different colors and textures, different ways the light changed the landscape.”

OK, so once back home, how to transfer what she saw though the lens to something that could be printed on canvas or paper, embedded in metal? Working on her pictures, getting them ready to frame and show, she tried experimenting with Adobe Lightroom. (Humphrey teaches classes in this technique.) “I found ways to make my photographs share the feelings and emotions I experienced when I took them. I’d discovered and mastered how to share the glow!”

Today, Humphrey’s imminently recognizable photographs hang in galleries around Western Colorado. You can find her at many places, including the Appleshed in Cedaredge, the Ranch History Museum in Ridgway through Oct. 13^th, Craig Gallery in Palisade, and at LaNoue DuBois Winery on Trout Road in Montrose, where she shares an artists’ reception and fundraiser for Tri-River Area Livestock Judging with Giovanna Designs, “Two Western Women” at LaNou DuBois Winery, Friday, September 20, 6-8 pm..