Susanne Page, who photographed Native American life with warmth and sensitivity, earning the trust of Hopi and Navajo leaders before taking pictures that documented spiritual ceremonies and traditional practices seldom seen by outsiders, died May 13 in Alexandria, Va. She was 86.
The cause was brain cancer, said her daughter Lindsey Truitt. Ms. Page, who lived in Waterford, Va., died at the home of another daughter, Kendall Barrett, 10 days after being diagnosed with cancer.
Across a more than four-decade photography career, Ms. Page trained her lens on Arabian horses, Eritrean farmers, Chesapeake Bay watermen and the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. Her pictures appeared in books and art galleries, were acquired by the National Museum of the American Indian, and ran in magazines including Smithsonian, National Geographic, Mother Jones and Potomac, the former Sunday supplement of The Washington Post.
Although she was based in Washington for much of her career, Ms. Page spent years crisscrossing the arid mesas of northeastern Arizona, capturing Native American life in the region in pictures that were “intimate yet reverent,” as a reviewer for American Photographer magazine once put it.
Many of those photographs had a monumental quality, as in a sunrise picture that captured the horned silhouettes of wooden kachina figures used in a Hopi ceremony. Others were more playful, such as an image of a Navajo girl feeding a lamb 7UP from the bottle.
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Whatever the subject, Truitt said in a phone interview, Ms. Page’s work was guided by a profound respect for the people and cultures she was documenting.
“She would not hide behind a camera. She connected with a person and then took her camera out,” said Truitt, who joined her mother on many of her photography assignments. “When she first visited the Hopi, it was maybe a year before she started taking her camera out.”
Ms. Page was a single mother with three children working for a magazine published by the U.S. Information Agency when she began photographing Native Americans in the Southwest, taking an assignment to cover the opening of a new school run by the Navajo Nation. She lived with the Navajo for parts of three years while taking the pictures that resulted in her first book, “Song of the Earth Spirit” (1973), which she intended as “a beautiful, sad, happy, powerful Navajo poem, not an Anglo sightseeing bus.”
Published by the environmental organization Friends of the Earth with a foreword from the group’s founder, David Brower, the book impressed non-Indian readers as well as tribal leaders. A reviewer for Alabama’s Anniston Star praised the “gemlike quality” of her pictures, “each a masterpiece in itself,” while members of the Hopi invited Ms. Page — then known as Susanne Anderson — to produce a similar book about their own tribe.
By then, Ms. Page had started working with Jake Page, a Smithsonian magazine editor and writer. They soon married, and he joined her in documenting the Hopi, kicking off a decades-long partnership in which she took the pictures and he wrote the text.
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Visiting the Hopi for the first time in December 1974, they flew to Albuquerque, rented a Volkswagen Beetle and drove into the desert, where the temperature gauge on their dashboard dropped to about 10 degrees. Their unease only grew as they approached Oraibi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America. The Hopi had shunned outsiders for decades, disillusioned by camera-toting anthropologists who had taken pictures without permission.
“Warning,” read a sign outside the village. “No outside White visitors allowed. Because of your failure to obey the laws of our tribe as well as the laws of your own, this village is hereby closed.”
For the next eight years, Ms. Page and her husband returned to the Hopi reservation about two dozen times, befriending members of the tribe and gathering material for their book, “Hopi” (1982). They documented an eagle-hunting ceremony, a land dispute with the Navajo and quotidian tasks such as corn harvesting, as well as religious practices that included a pilgrimage that “only 14 living people in the world have ever made,” according to the book’s publisher, Abrams.
The Pages later recalled that after Navajo chairman Peterson Zah looked through a copy of the book, he told Susanne, “We want one of these, but bigger.” The couple soon began work on another tribal portrait, “Navajo” (1995), and later collaborated on books including a “Field Guide to Southwest Indian Arts and Crafts” (1998).
“Susanne and I were well aware, during all this time, that we were whites — respectively pahanas (Hopi) and billeganas (Navajo) — undertaking tasks that might more appropriately be done by members of the two tribes themselves,” Jake Page wrote in his 2003 book “In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians.” “But they asked us, and we were happy to oblige.”
The older of two daughters, Susanne Calista Stone was born in Upper Montclair, N.J., on March 3, 1938. Her father worked for Chemical Bank in New York and became an intelligence officer, serving in the Army during World War II and later joining the CIA. The family settled in Washington, where Ms. Page’s mother, a homemaker, started an annual charity event, the Mouse Sale, benefiting hospitals and nonprofits.
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Ms. Page graduated from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and studied painting in London, where her father was stationed. She later enrolled at George Washington University, dropping out to marry a fellow student, future Washington lawyer Thomas H. Truitt. That marriage ended in divorce, as did a brief marriage to environmental lawyer Frederick R. Anderson.
By the late 1960s, Ms. Page had joined the U.S. Information Agency, where she got a job as a photo editor at America Illustrated, a glossy magazine that was distributed behind the Iron Curtain, offering Russian-language readers a glowing depiction of American life.
“Very quickly, her eye made her shine,” her daughter Lindsey recalled. “Somebody said, ‘You should start taking pictures,’ and handed her this old Nikon, 14 years old.” Soon, she was sent on photography assignments, including for a fishing story that led her to spend weeks on Chesapeake Bay skipjacks, her young children in tow.
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While Jake, her third husband, “was basically shy,” in her telling, Ms. Page was more outgoing, asking most of the questions and remaining in touch with subjects decades after taking their picture. “I have tried to photograph people the way I feel that they see themselves,” she said, “rather than the way an outsider might want to see them.”
She and her husband moved to New Mexico in 1988 and lived in Colorado before his death in 2016. Survivors include three daughters from her first marriage, Kendall Barrett and Lindsey and Sally Truitt; three stepdaughters, Dana, Brooke and Lea Page; 13 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Wherever she lived, Ms. Page dug a pond, according to her family, creating a vibrant backyard ecosystem home to fish, turtles, flowers and insects. For a time, she and her husband also had a walk-in aviary filled with canaries, nightingales, finches and quail, which once chased a baby mouse into the living room — “a cute sight, but the wrong destination,” wrote Jake Page, who often noted the deep bond that he and his wife felt with the natural world.
“We are inclined,” he once said in discussing their work, “to see important (or merely winsome) answers in such things as birds, the American Southwest and its less extravagant inhabitants, and other nonsensational aspects of life.”
