Susanne Page, Who Took Rare Photos of the Hopi and Navajo, Dies at 86

Susanne Page, whose intimate photographs of the Hopi tribe and Navajo nation opened a rare window on the everyday culture of Indigenous people in America’s Southwest, died on May 13 in Alexandria, Va. She was 86.

The cause of her death, at the home of her daughter, Kendall Barrett, was brain cancer, another daughter, Lindsey Truitt, said.

Ms. Page was in the midst of a 40-year career as a photographer for the United States Information Agency when she began creating vivid images of Native Americans and the flora and fauna that sustained them — work that embraced the beauty of the natural world and its profound spiritual significance to those Indigenous people. Her work appeared in magazines like National Geographic and Smithsonian and in several books

Along the way she introduced the subject of Native Americans of the Southwest to Jake Page, an editor and columnist at Smithsonian.

Intrigued by her first book,“Song of the Earth Spirit” (1972), about traditional Navajo life in Arizona, Mr. Page commissioned her to write an article about Navajo witchcraft. While that article failed to materialize, Hopi elders, impressed by the seriousness of the Navajo book, invited Ms. Page, who went by the name Susanne Anderson then, to document their tribe, offering her access to its reservation in Northern Arizona.

She seized on the opportunity, becoming the first outside photographer to be authorized to work on the reservation since early in the 20th century. She also invited Mr. Page to help on the project, a prospect so enticing to him that he retired from Smithsonian so that he could join her.