Susan Derges is a pioneering force in camera-less photography. Having trained in painting, Derges is particularly drawn to abstraction and has made a career of making room in photography for this interest. Believing that “the camera always separates the subject from the viewer,” Derges seeks to eliminate this mediation by exposing her photographic paper directly to nature—capturing ambient light in riverbeds, refracted faces in water droplets, and the shadows of leaves and trees in photograms. “This is essentially more about print-making rather than photography,” she has said. “I'm painting with light—or least, that's the way it feels to me.”