Susan Wilson (photographer)

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Susan Wilson is a photographer, author, multimedia artist, educator, and public historian, based since 1976 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the House Historian of the Omni Parker House in Boston, a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center in Waltham, and the owner/photographer of Susan Wilson Photo in Cambridge.

Early Life and Work

Born Susan Carolyn Relyea in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Madison, New Jersey, she attended Tufts University (Medford, Massachusetts) where she received a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) and M.A. in history, then completed her PhD coursework. She left graduate school to study photography at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and to work as a framing instructor at Frameworks in Cambridge.

In addition to performing in folk music groups and rock bands from ages fourteen through twenty-four, Wilson taught seventh grade social studies in Columbia, Missouri, as well as European and Russian history at Tufts, while pursuing graduate degrees. During her time at the Museum School, she began writing and photographing for Boston’s two feminist newspapers. Her positions as Music Editor of Equal Times and Photo Editor of Sojourner led to work for The Boston Globe, where she began freelancing in 1978. Her stories and images focusing on women performers, the arts, entertainment, history, and culture appeared in the Globe from 1978 to 1996. Her Boston history columns included “Sites and Insights” and “History Notebook.” Many of her “Sites and Insights” columns were later collected in a book, Boston Sites and Insights, published by Beacon Press.

Work as Photographer

In 1981, she began a decade of teaching photojournalism at the New England School of Photography (NESOP), then founded the school’s Crosscurrents seminar series, which she directed for twenty years. She served as the house photographer at the Cambridge folk music club, Passim, from the late 1970s until its original owners retired in 1995. For two decades beginning in 1994, she was portrait photographer for honors ensembles and other classical musicians at the New England Conservatory of Music, work she later extended to students and faculty at the Longy School of Music.

Beginning in 1978, Wilson operated a portrait studio in Cambridge, where she specialized in photographing a variety of musical performers, including Rebecca Parris, Bill Harley, the Lydian String Quartet, Keith Lockhart, Sanford Sylvan, D’Anna Fortunato, Pete Seeger, Bill Morrissey, Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, Taj Mahal, Alison Krauss, and Patty Larkin, as well as literary artists such as Adrienne Rich, Anita Diamant, and Stephen McCauley. Wilson’s photographic artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in greater Boston and on Cape Cod.

Work as Public Historian

Wilson consulted with, worked for, and served on select boards of many of Boston’s historic organizations, including the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, the Old South Meetinghouse, the Dimock Center, Boston HarborWalk, the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, the National Park Service, Boston By Foot, and the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative. She researched, wrote, and delivered lectures or walking tours for a variety of groups, including the Omni Parker House, Brandeis University, the Old South Meetinghouse, ArtWeek Boston, The Boston Literary Cultural District, Forest Hills Educational Trust, Lahey Health, Primary Source, Road Scholar, the Boston Athenaeum, Tufts University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Longy School of Music.

For a dozen years beginning in 2005, she collaborated with the Old South Meetinghouse to present an annual history quiz known as “The Fife Is Right,” which was featured on the WGBH Forum Network. A member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Wilson researched and wrote the historic kiosk signage on Boston Common for the City of Boston (1996), headed a team of researchers, visual artists, and designers to develop The Maritime Museum at Battery Wharf and Harbor Walk signage in Boston’s North End (2008), and was historic consultant to Lahey Health for the development of their History Wall in Burlington, Massachusetts (2017).

Books on Boston History

Wilson's history columns for The Boston Globe laid the foundation for books of stories and images on Boston history. A contributing author for Boston and the American Revolution (1998) and Symphony Hall: The First 100 Years (2000), she also wrote several solo volumes:

• Boston Sites and Insights: A Multicultural Guide to 50 Historic Landmarks in and Around Boston (Beacon Press, 1994)
• Garden of Memories: A Guide to Historic Forest Hills (Forest Hills Educational Trust, 1998)
• Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
• The Omni Parker House: A Brief History of America’s Longest Continuously Operating Hotel (Omni Parker House, 2001).
• Boston Sites and Insights: An Essential Guide to Historic Landmarks In and Around Boston (Beacon Press, Revised and Updated Edition, 2004)
• The Literary Trail of Greater Boston: A Tour of Sites in Boston, Cambridge, and Concord (Commonwealth Editions, Revised and Updated Edition, 2005)
• The Omni Parker House: A Brief History of America’s Longest Continuously Operating Hotel (Omni Parker House, Expanded 150th Anniversary Edition, 2008).
• Heaven By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House (The Omni Parker House, 2014)
• Tales from the Old Corner: Celebrating 300 Years (Historic Boston Incorporated, 2018)

Since 2016, Wilson has been a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she is researching and writing a biography, Women and Children First: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Susan Dimock (1847–75).

Multimedia Work

Since 2002, Wilson has served as Artistic Director for the multimedia company, Melodic Vision. Among the shows she performed and toured with co-director Rebecca Strauss are Noche de Muertos (chronicling Mexico’s Day of the Dead) and Sacred Grounds, Sacred Sounds (featuring the music and musicians of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris). Melodic Vision’s video, Iluminación, was a featured selection at the Provincetown International Film Festival in 2011. Other of Melodic Vision’s multimedia works include The Boston Women’s Memorial and a profile of Dr. Pedro Del Nido, the latter for Children’s Hospital, Boston.

References

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