CORINTH — When she first came to Vermont, in 1972, Suzanne Opton didn’t really know what to expect.

She had grown up in Portland, Ore., one of three children of parents who had escaped the Holocaust. She’d gone to Smith College, and had worked as a journalist in California, where she’d covered the Charles Manson trial.

She’d come to Vermont with Richard Brick, who later became a well-known movie producer and professor at Columbia University, but was then at the start of his career. Opton helped him make a short documentary, “Last Stand Farmer,” about Chelsea residents Richard and Helen O’Donnell.

The film came out in 1976, but before that Opton got to know people around Chelsea, many of them living at the margins. She brought a camera with her and took a series of photographs that remained largely unseen until a couple of years ago, when they were published in a book called “Into the Light Cellar.” Taking those photographs and getting to know the people she photographed was what revealed to Opton that she was an artist.

“That’s when she really decided she wanted to be a photographer,” her son, Jules Opton, said in a recent phone interview.

After taking the Chelsea photographs, Opton would go on to become a successful commercial portrait photographer, but more importantly a unique figure in the art world. She mixed photography and performance in novel ways, including in a series of portraits of American soldiers who’d served during this century’s wars.

Opton died July 26 at her home in Corinth after a 27-year battle with cancer. She was 79.

Vermont and the people she met in Chelsea ran deep through Opton’s life and work. In meeting, photographing and interviewing people like brothers Frank and Walter Hayes, siblings Ethel and Ubert Clough and mother and daughter Verna and Gayleen Aiken, she found people who were rooted in place and time in ways she had never encountered.

“My family all fled and these people had lived in this place for three generations and more. That was just fascinating to me,” Opton said in an interview conducted by Kerry DeWolfe and filmed by Brian Carroll for “Endlessly an Observer,” the short documentary they released this year about Opton. “And I knew more about them than subsequently I knew about anybody, because photography is, as (famed portrait photographer Richard) Avedon said, a great intimacy with no past and no future, but that wasn’t true here. I spent a lot of time with these people and wanted to know everything about them.”

Living in Chelsea and getting to know the people she photographed was an unusual introduction to Vermont, even amid a wave of population growth. The state’s population grew by 14% during the 1960s, helped by a booming economy and the back to the land movement. (Since 1970, Vermont’s population has grown from around 440,000 to nearly 650,000.)

“I had no idea about rural life. None,” Opton told DeWolfe in an interview recording provided by Carroll. “So it was fascinating, and no one was taking pictures then. Everywhere I went I had a camera.”

“I was surprised how focused she was at that age,” Jules Opton said in a phone interview from his home in Maine. She had Jules in 1980, when she was in a relationship with Daniel Himmelfarb, who owned and operated Jamie Canvas, the leading art supply store in SoHo, then a scruffy downtown Manhattan neighborhood. “Thinking about it now, it was before I was born and she had more time and was able to focus then on her work in a way that she wasn’t able to” when she was raising him, Jules Opton said.

She raised Jules as a single parent, but with a large network of friends, both in New York, where they lived during the school year while Jules attended P.S. 3, and during the summers, which were often spent in Vermont.

“She rented lots of different places around here in the summer,” Sandy Edmonds, who met and befriended Opton in the mid-1970s, said in a phone interview. Like Opton, Edmonds has divided her time between New York and Vermont and the friends spent time together in both places. Edmonds’ son Sam Kelman was born within days of Jules, and they are close friends, now in their 40s.

“She was always interested in alternative lives, you might say,” Edmonds, a Brooklyn resident, said in a phone interview from her home in Washington, Vt. “She managed to kind of get everybody interested in what she was doing.”

Edmonds posed for Opton many times, which Opton viewed as a form of play. “You never knew exactly what she was thinking,” Edmonds said. “She might not have known what she was thinking.”

Opton’s professional career, which she embarked on to earn a living for herself and her son, started with taking still-life photographs for book covers, which wasn’t very lucrative, Jules Opton said. But soon she was taking portraits, particularly of business leaders for big magazines. The same sense of play that she brought to her personal work resulted in original portraits, less busy and staged than the work of, say, Annie Liebowitz, but less austere than the work of Richard Avedon, who used a sheet of white paper as a background. She taught portraiture at the International Center of Photography in New York for many years.

Opton made prints of some of the Chelsea photographs, but they sat in a file for most of her career. She showed some of them in Chelsea once, but otherwise they were out of the light.

“For decades she was always talking about it,” Jules Opton said.

During the coronavirus pandemic, she came back to Vermont, to a house she’d bought in Corinth, next to the post office in Cookeville, in 2015, Edward Cooper, Opton’s partner since 2017, said in an interview. The pandemic, with its enforced stability of place, reminded her a bit of the Chelsea friends she’d photographed. With the help of Makenna Goodman, a novelist and Vershire resident who’s married to Sam Kelman, Opton assembled “Into the Light Cellar.”

It’s unlike other Vermont photography books in that it has no agenda other than to present the lives of its largely isolated and poor, yet mostly contented subjects. Opton worried that the photographs are now of greater historical significance than artistic value, her son said.

“She was always very hard on herself. She never felt like she’d done enough or achieved enough,” he said. Since she was sick for so long, she hadn’t had as much chance to do as much work as she’d have liked.

Despite her long association with Vermont, Opton was “still a New Yorker, in my view,” her son said.

But the Vermont photographs were part of her life’s foundation.

She and friends in Vermont were reenacting some of the photographs from the 1970s, getting into costumes and posing. It was part homage to her original subjects, who now are dead, and part memory play, another point of connection .

Vermont also adopted her. She spent much of the last decade of her illness here.

“She loved this community and made tons of friends,” Cooper said.

She wanted a natural burial, which must happen soon after death. Word got around so quickly that around 40 people were in attendance at West Corinth Cemetery. “It was a very moving, every improvised ceremony,” Cooper said. “It was barely a ceremony at all. Nobody knew what to do.”

Friends donated her shroud and wrapped her body in it and others hand dug her grave before gathering to commit her to Vermont’s soil, a commitment she’d already made herself.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.