On Location With Susan Wood

Following the success of the “The Worlds of Julie Andrews,” “Tarnished Angels: The Artwork of Sabina Streeter” and the “Hegedus/Pennebaker Retrospective,” Sag Harbor Cinema presents a new show on its third floor.

“Susan Wood: On Location” features the film-related work of Susan Wood, a renowned magazine photographer who also covered the sets of iconic 1960 films such as “Easy Rider” (1969), “Hatari!” (1962) and “Mirage’ (1965). “Susan Wood: On Location” will open on Friday, August 4, at 6 p.m. and will run until September 10. On August 10, Wood will join Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Sag Harbor Cinema’s founding artistic director, in a conversation about her work, following a screening of “Easy Rider.”

While under contract with Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox as a special projects photographer, Wood captured the filming process and its stars “unguarded” as well as the flavor of the era. On view in the cinema will be photographs of Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, John Wayne, Jim Brown, Gregory Peck, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and many others.

“When a movie is being made, the still photographer is a secondary thing and at times considered a nuisance,” said Wood of her assignments on film sets. “Because you’re not an essential member of the set, you have to use all your wit and charm to even get near the action when the shoot is going on. And the sound person will pick up every click of your camera, so you have to be very careful not to be disruptive.

“The advertising and publicity department wants specific shots and you have to set up your own photos — whether they’re portraits of individual actors or the director. And when you need to get a layout with everyone in the picture, it’s extremely hard to wrangle. You have to use whatever ineffable magic you have within you to get connected so they can trust you. And with that trust, you get the shot!”

“Through their composition, their wonderful inner movement and because of her uncanny ability to catch her subjects ‘unguarded,’ Susan Wood’s set images tell the behind-the-scenes stories of some very famous films, said Vallan. “They also speak of the restlessness and the irreverent glamor of the sixties. I am thrilled to be able to bring this show to our third floor, a space that we have consistently used to further illuminate the process and the culture of film.”

Susan Wood’s photographs were made during years of great social change, and her own career followed a similar trajectory. A born and bred New Yorker, she was involved with the original “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue and later won a Clio, the most sought-after award in advertising. In 1954 her photographs appeared in the premiere issue of Sports Illustrated.

Mademoiselle chose her as one of their “Ten Young Women of the Year” in 1961. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, her photographs could be seen in Vogue, Life, People and New York magazines. She was a regular contributor to Look magazine, most notably for a 1969 cover story on John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 1971, her investigative reportage on medical malfeasance titled “Dr. Feelgood,” appeared as a cover article in New York magazine.

Noted for her movie stills, Wood was under contract to Paramount Pictures, United Artists and 20th Century Fox. Prior exhibitions of her movie stills were presented in conjunction with the Dublin International Film Festival (2014), Hamptons International Film Festival (2014), and Glasgow Film Festival (2020). Most recently a number of her movie stills were included in the multimedia site-specific solo exhibition, “Wind Up!” (2023), at the Irish Georgian Society’s City Assembly House in Dublin.

Involved in the fight for women’s rights and equality in the 1960s and 1970s, Wood was a founding member of the Women’s Forum, and counted as friends many of the vanguard of the feminist movement including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Says Wood, now 91, “I’m a working woman from an age when women still wondered if we could and/or should work. I remember a woman scientist’s graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953 recommending we graduates keep some part of our brain actively engaged in an intellectual project even if we visited it only occasionally. ‘Picking up knitting’ was her analogy. Can you imagine the cat calls and boos someone today would get in response?”

Susan Wood resides primarily in Amagansett, with additional residences in New York City and on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For details, visit sagharborcinema.org.