Makers & Mentors: Susan Alta Martin

Parable of the Land 2: Supposition, 17x22in, ripped and wrinkled digital prints, sheet steel, magnets, 2025

What is it like to balance teaching and an active artistic practice?

Much of the time it is like being buried alive. I say that because during the regular semester lots of ideas come to me, but I can’t actually act on any of them because there simply isn’t time. My art practice gets squeezed into short breaks, and summer, along with all the other household chores and family issues that can’t be addressed while school is in session. During the semester it is a 24/7 job. Like spray foam insulation, teaching expands into all the cracks and fills all my time.

But, spending my days explaining the basics of photography to students, deconstructing the contemporary art world for them, and working with them every day to find ways to make their images do what they wanted them to do, does have benefits. There is a different level of understanding that happens when you take something you think you know, and try to explain it to someone who has never thought about it before.

I would sometimes find myself fumbling, trying to find the words to explain something I thought I understood really well. In the process of finding the right words I learned a lot. I would get questions as seemingly basic as what makes photography an art form. With images all around us, all the time, what makes one image art and another not?

It took me a while to get the words for an answer. It comes down to ‘making’ vs. ‘taking’ photographs. At the root of the difference is something my friend Rob Amberg told me. He said you have to ask the question: “Where do I stand?” He meant this both literally - where do you put your body and camera in relation to what you are photographing - and figuratively - what is your opinion on what you are taking a picture of.

Photographers are not just passive observers, documenting whatever is in the center of the frame. They are the ones creating the relationships between the elements within an image in order to convey their own ideas. One of my ways of explaining this to students was to remind them that ‘the subject is not the subject’ – meaning that an image should be about something greater than what is actually pictured within the frame.

For these pieces I stand with Greta Thunberg. She has described global leaders’ responses to climate change as “beyond absurd.” It is this sentiment that I want to tap into with this series. In the large piece, garish images of yard sale junk sit precariously atop a form made of images of naturally eroding dirt from southern Utah to create a form borrowed from the landscape – the balancing rock.

In the wall pieces, more images from the yard sale series form layers that may seem solid but on closer inspection reveal their fragility. Traveling around the country, the Southwest in particular, I recently came to see landforms, like those referenced here, as parables – short, moralistic, tales that the earth itself is telling.

Once you start looking, these parables of fragility and precarity are everywhere. To me, the yard sale junk represents our complicated relationship to the consumerist products pushed on us by global financial capitalists. That these capitalists continue their push despite the fact that it is leading us all towards imminent environmental collapse, is indeed beyond absurd.

Susan Alta Martin Assistant Professor of Photography Western Carolina University School of Art and Design Email: saltamar@jackson.main.nc.us Website: susanaltamartin.com