Meet Susan and Don
Don Carson and Susan Murphy are artists and longtime partners whose work is rooted in curiosity, reverence, and attention to the world around them. Spirit Chasers brings together years of shared observation – an invitation to look closely, linger longer, and sense what remains just beneath the surface.
Don Carson (b. 1949, Oregon) is a photographer whose work bridges decades of commercial mastery and artistic experiment. After early studies in psychology and photography, he moved to New York in 1976, apprenticing with Robert Mapplethorpe, Lord Snowdon, Sol Leiter, Henry Groskinsky, Howard Sochurek, and other leading figures. By the 1980s he had established an independent practice in architectural, industrial, and editorial photography, with publications in Smithsonian, Time, Sunset, House Beautiful, Stereophile, and 50 Plus, and corporate clients including Carnegie Hall and R.R. Donnelley.
Carson’s artistic practice took new direction in 1990, when he and his wife, dancer and aerialist Susan Murphy, began photographing together in wilderness landscapes of the American West. Using a medium-format Kodak Graflex XL, he developed an in-camera masking technique that sequentially layered exposures, producing seamless images where body and landscape merge across time. Every print was hand-crafted, from darkroom work to custom stone-like frames. His photographs have been shown at Artisimo Gallery (AZ), Exposures Gallery (AZ), Anita Shapolsky Gallery (NY), and Visions North (CA), as well as major art fairs nationwide.
In 2002 Carson designed and built Canopy Studio in Athens, GA, one of the Southeast’s largest aerial arts centers, while continuing his photographic collaborations. In 2017 and 2024 he returned with Murphy to earlier landscapes, revisiting and re-making images first captured in the 1990s. Their decades-long dialogue of body, camera, and earth culminates in Spirit Chasers, his first photobook.
Susan Murphy (b. 1947, Jesup, GA) is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and pioneer of aerial movement whose career spans more than four decades. After earning a BA in Modern Dance from the University of North Carolina, she pursued an MFA at Mills College in Berkeley, studying with aerial innovator Terry Sendgraff and authentic movement pioneer Mary Whitehouse. In the 1980s she taught and performed in East Hampton, worked with painter Willem de Kooning, and later moved to New York City, where she became a licensed massage therapist and Certified Movement Analyst from the Laban Institute. She established a loft studio in Chelsea, teaching and performing aerial dance, culminating in a 1988 performance at Lincoln Center.
In 1990 she married photographer Don Carson and relocated to Bolinas, California. Together they began the collaboration that became Spirit Chasers, merging Carson’s in-camera experiments with Murphy’s practice of movement in wilderness landscapes. Her journals from these journeys accompany the photographs, extending the dialogue between body, earth, and time.
In 1999 Murphy was appointed Guest Artist in the University of Georgia Dance Department, where she introduced aerial dance to the Southeast. She and Carson founded Canopy Studio in Athens in 2002, now the largest aerial dance center in the Southeast. In 2009 they built and established a smaller studio on the marshlands of Darien, GA, hosting performances and retreats. In 2021 she received the Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities for the State of Georgia.
Her lifelong practice culminates in Spirit Chasers, her first book, co-created with Carson across three decades of photography and journaling.
