ARTISTS

Susannah Ray

Project Space (2023)

Down For the Day

Susannah Ray works on long form documentary projects that explore the relationship of people and
landscape and how public space offers opportunities for escape, leisure, and transcendence. Many of
her projects have occurred at the intersection of city and water, describing how New Yorkers’ lives are
shaped by the waters that ring the city. Amidst the challenges of access, infrastructure, history, and
climate change, Susannah Ray finds what is possible, the unexpectedly beautiful, and the resilience of
both people and place. Susannah Ray has had solo exhibitions at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Benrubi Gallery, Fordham University, and Governor’s Island. Her photographs have been published as the monographs New York Waterways and Right Coast and have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The British Journal of Photography. Her work appears in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York, Princeton University, The Bronx Museum of the arts, as well as in corporate, state, and private collections. Born in Washington D.C., she has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BA from Princeton University and is a longtime photographic educator.

The photographs in Down For the Day (2016-present) are made along a 15 block stretch of Rockaway
Beach, Queens. Less than a mile long, this section of beach is among the most utilized in New York
City, hosting shoulder to shoulder crowds on summer weekends. The project title, Down For the Day,
is the local description of day trippers, frequently called DFDs. This term, often meant to distance
visitors from locals, here celebrates the tangled bodies and cramped encampments as attempts at
finding not only respite from the city heat, but momentary paradise, imperfect but one’s own.
Down For the Day continues a cycle of projects that depict the relationship between New York City, its
diverse citizens, and its urban waterways. Throughout my photographic practice I have sought to
understand the contradiction between the ideal and the actual; my photographs occur in the space, both literal and metaphorical, between the two. My hope is to find Eden in the everyday, to witness how we reconcile ourselves to the places and the life we live, how we find joy, beauty, and even transcendence in our immediate moment.