Her first major series of work on boxers, KNOCKOUT, as described by The New Yorker , “owe more to Caravaggio than to Sports Illustrated". Exhibited in Fort Worth, New York, and at Paris Photo, KNOCKOUT marked Suder’s arrival on the U.S. art scene as an image maker of unusual emotional and visual power.

Her current project, Everybody is Somebody, focuses on the hundreds of thousands living on the streets: the abandoned, the lost, the forgotten, working poor, war veterans, abused women and children, the addicted, victims and victimizers. Suder believes the lives of those living on the streets and their reasons for making their homes on beaches and sidewalks, under stairwells and in bathroom stalls are as varied as human beings are themselves. She and writer Jason A. Suder, set out to show, with dignity, the lives of those living on the streets and peel back the layers of debris that cover the truth about what brought them there.   The work was showcased at the Bombay Beach Biennale and featured in The New York Times, Playboy Magazine, Los Angeles Times and KCRW.

Suder’s other series of work have chronicled the street life and domesticity of Paris, Havana, Morocco and Coney Island; a medical mission in Guatemala; religious festivals in Sicily; portraits of breast cancer survivors; and life on the Subway in New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. Diverse as these contexts are, Suder’s images maintain a sensitivity to subjects in extremes of physical, emotional and social tension. She especially latches onto moments of vulnerability and, in UNDERGROUND, creates encounters that make her an active participant in her images. The psychological and graphic power of the work is reinforced by its significant scale, dramatic lighting and vivid color.

Kathy Suder’s work has been included in three thematic museum exhibitions in the United States and in 2015 was the subject of the solo exhibition UNDERGROUND: Photographs by Kathy Sherman Suder at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX. 

Acquired by a number of major private collectors, her photographs are also in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Her book, UNDERGROUND: LONDON•TOYKO•NEW YORK, which accompanied the exhibition, won accolades and competitions.  

It’s clear that almost two decades as an oil painter inform her photography.  Before working as a visual artist, Suder designed and painted children’s furniture, as owner of FUN-iture©, that was featured in Neiman Marcus,FAO Swartz, and Spiegels Christmas Catalogs in addition to In Style Magazine.  In the early 2000s, she studied with two iconic photographers, Ralph Gibson and Eikoh Hosoe where she learned about photographing the body with particular attention to shadow and light.