Marilyn ©Billy Howard
A force of nature has departed this sphere of conscious life, and her leaving has left a chasm of dimensions measured in the hearts and souls of those loved and inspired by her. I am devastated by the loss, a feeling only possible by experiencing the opposing value, joy, and being friends with Marilyn was joyful.
Her life was a full force creative journey. From her art to her cooking to the love she had for so many, nothing was abridged, she threw herself fearlessly into it all.
I have been a photographer for forty-five years, and for forty of those I have known Marilyn. Her influence and encouragement, her joy and pathos, all elevated my work as I hope I did for her. In 1983, I hired her to fill an opening at Emory University where I ran the photography department for the school’s news service. What stood out in her portfolio was not only an eye for composition but a sense of light and emotion, and she had experience with a 4 x 5 large-format camera, a skill I was eager to learn. I assigned her a cover shot for Emory Magazine, a university publication that, at the time, was judged the best in the country. The assignment was a still-life, and I was excited to see her in action. I rented the camera and lens and watched as she skillfully set up the tableau and the camera.
Ensconced beneath the black cloth used to block out light, enabling her to see the glass plate where the image—in reverse and upside down—appeared, she reached around to adjust the lens. I marveled when, with one little movement, the lens detached from the camera and flipped end-over-end to the concrete floor, where it smashed with a resounding bang, rendering it inoperable. I suspected this was not a good thing.
The following hours were spent finding a camera repair shop and miraculously having the camera lens repaired in time to meet the deadline. The photograph she eventually made was beautiful and we bonded as she realized her boss viewed snafus with a sense of humor and I realized that, despite obstacles, she would always turn in a stunning photograph.
Regardless of how animated it sometimes looked when she was taking a photograph, the resulting image was always the same, exquisite. In my estimation, her photographic work rests with the greats, partially due to her fearlessness to try new ideas (or cameras!) and an insatiable curiosity about people. She used copy machines, colored pencils, and other mixed media to create large mural prints of a series of Southern women for a commission by the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport for their then new international concourse. It was a technique she came up with on her own and perfected in the creation of the work. Fearless flyer indeed.
But it was her fascination for the lives of people who lived on the margins of society that led to some of her most iconic work. In the 1980s and ’90s, she documented Atlanta’s exotic dancers, many from the Clermont Lounge, renowned as Atlanta’s oldest establishment where garters and stiletto heels both began and ended sartorial considerations.
The resulting book, Dancing Naked in the Material World was groundbreaking and led to an exhibit at The Leica Gallery in New York City. I drove with her and a vanload of framed photographs of nearly-naked women to New York where we hung the exhibit. She was invited to appear on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show along with a couple of the dancers. I was in the audience. I am not usually at a loss for words, but suffice it to say, it was epic! The book received international acclaim.
Her curiosity led her to Atlanta’s store front churches, micro-congregations of insular religious sects. Before long, the congregations adopted Marilyn, welcoming her into their world because of her authenticity. Photography was the vehicle, but connection was the purpose, and they sensed that. It was that same trust that invited her into the inner sanctums of the dancers’ world. There was a light that shown through her and if you were lucky enough for it to shine on you, you were gifted a lasting friendship.
My favorite of her photographs was taken on a lonely, remote beach on the coast of Maine as a group of Mennonite women, staring out over the horizon, viewed the ocean for the first time. That one image contains multitudes, the stories limited only by the imagination of the viewer.
There are particulars that should be mentioned—the vast list of international collectors who acquired her images, the grants and awards she received, her National Endowment for the Arts and Southern Arts Federation Fellowship, her artist-in-residency at L’Ecole Nationale De La Photographie, in Arles, France—but as satisfying as they were to Marilyn the professional—it was the relationships with her subjects that tell the story of Marilyn the person.
In addition to her work at Emory, she was the senior photographer for the 1996 Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. Before the games, Marilyn and I set up a studio inside the stadium and photographed more than fifty Atlantans, our backdrops were side by side as we both worked to get beautiful portraits, cheering each other on. They were projected on the JumboTron screen during the opening ceremonies as Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech played over the stadium speakers. It was a thrill of a lifetime, made more meaningful because two good friends shared the experience.
There were the iconic portraits she made of legends like Civil Rights icon John Lewis, Jane Fonda, Michelle Obama, and music legend and Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell. But the people she revered most were the unsung heroes of everyday struggles. She also turned her camera on herself. Using personal X-rays and diagnostic photographs, she created masterful mixed-media self-portraits of her aging process, a courageous project that announced she would not, as Dylan Thomas exclaimed, “go gentle into that good night.”
In the early 2000s, Marilyn moved to Berkley Lake, an Atlanta suburb, with her husband Bill Smith. Surrounded by nature, Marilyn turned her attention to the water, focusing on the abstract beauty of light and shadow reflecting from the surface. She approached her new subject with the same curiosity and wonder that infused her portraits of people. She mused that her new subject helped her find balance.
The acclaim these images received led to a commission for a new office building in Atlanta where she created a mural of one of her photographs, “Liquid Emerald”, on seven glass panels, each 4’ x 7’ and weighing 200 lbs—that’s a three-quarter ton photograph! Las Vegas developer and visionary, Uri Vaknin, knew Marilyn from his time as a high-end gallery owner in Atlanta. He now had a luxury condominium community that needed a scene-setting work of art. He knew of Marilyn’s “Liquid Emerald” and wanted Marilyn to create an even larger work for his project to give a sense of an oasis in the desert. The resulting photograph is a three-wall triptych covering fifty-four-linear feet in the building lobby. To take on such a project is like being a trapeze artist without a net, everything about the design of the building rested on this one work of art, yet to be created. I was in awe.
Marilyn and ‘Liquid Emerald’ ©Billy Howard
In a recent, rare interview, Hollywood legend Liza Minnelli said of her career: “I made my own lane.” Suriani, a proud “Philly girl” to first- and second-generation Italians, carved her path with similar pluck and talent. The Atlanta photography community in the early 1980s was not exactly welcoming to women photographers. Marilyn suffered no foolish men who deigned to diminish her. I witnessed a clerk at one of the popular photo stores of the time cower and slink into the back of the store after making the wrong assumption about Marilyn—he well over 6 feet, Marilyn barely 5—he picked the wrong woman to pick on.
In pursing her goals without compromise, every woman photographer who has followed owes her a debt of gratitude. You can’t break through the glass ceiling until you reach it, and she gave women photographers a boost.
Her final challenge in life was Alzheimer’s disease. She fought with a sense of humor that never left her. Even when she could no longer speak, she would laugh, and she did so until she departed from life, from pain, and from a world where she sought justice through silver and light. She was my best friend, serving as my “Best Marilyn” in my wedding. When soon after, she was married, I served as her “Man of Honor.” She never gave much stock to societal norms and neither did I, perhaps one of the reasons we were so close.
We agreed that we both struck gold in our marriages. My wife, Laurie Shock, said of Marilyn that she “led with her heart,” and I believe that simple phrase sums her up nicely. Her last year and a half were spent in a memory care center where her husband Bill visited her almost every single day, usually twice a day. He is a saint. Indeed, we did strike gold.
Her impact was immense—on her loved ones, on those she mentored, on her friends, on Atlanta and our vibrant photography community, on the unseen people whose stories she shared with compassion—and on me.
I will miss her forever.
Marilyn Suriani Born 6/18/1951 Died 9/12/2024
A Celebration of Marilyn’s life will be held January 11, 2025, 3-5pm at Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center. Everyone is invited.
—Billy Howard
Click here for a video about her installation of “Waterway” in Las Vegas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etkp6kr7sPg
