EXECUTIVE ORDER: IMAGES OF 1970S CORPORATE AMERICA
For more than 40 years, Susan Ressler has been photographing affluence in America – in particular, the power relations that inhere in corporate and consumer culture. In Executive Order, Ressler invites us to examine the executive boardrooms, private offices, and lobbies of businesses that became especially prominent during the 1970s in downtown Los Angeles and other urban environments in the Mountain West. Ressler’s images provide a fascinating critique of corporate America during this period of explosive growth when profits were increasingly preempting people. Her work, which has an undercurrent of cool detachment coupled with a dose of irony, combines images devoid of people allowing us to see the hollowness of these modern work spaces, with portraits of employees playing the typical roles assigned to them in the new American economy.
The Capital Group, (from the Los Angeles Documentary Project)
From Executive Disorder, an essay by Mark Rice
In How We Got Here (2000), David Frum plumbed the 1970s for essential truths about contemporary American life, seeing in that decade the engines of economic and social transformation that, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “brought [us] modern life—for better or worse.” Frum called the 1970s “a time of unease and despair, punctuated by disaster.” He was writing in the waning days of the twentieth century, with Bill Clinton in the White House and a fog of unease and nostalgia misting the land. But if he was worried about the state of American life in 2000, he is even more concerned now in 2017.
Filmways
Jet Propelled
Perhaps most importantly, the country has installed Donald Trump in the White House. Frum’s cover story of the March 2017 issue of The Atlantic, “How to Build an Autocracy,” spells out how the Trump administration could lead the United States away from liberal democracy. Widely read and widely admired, Frum grimly assesses the current political situation, seeing in Trump threats to American life that are perhaps unlike any encountered in the past.
[Mark Rice] opens with Frum’s analyses of contemporary American life in order to draw attention to the fact that Susan Ressler’s collection of photographs, Executive Order, comes at an opportune time. Her images of corporate America were made in the mid to late 1970s and provide a glimpse inside a rising economic order as they reveal the reception rooms and inner sancta of premier corporate of office spaces. They were made at a pivotal point both in the postindustrial shifts of the American economy and in American photography, when a younger generation of photographers grappled with questions of aesthetics and epistemologies.
Bank of America
Susan Ressler was a participant in one of the largest and most ambitious of the National Endowment of the Arts surveys: the Los Angeles Documentary Project (1979–80). She was selected to participate “on the basis of [her] familiarity with Los Angeles and on the strengths of [the] documentary work” that she had already completed, both in Los Angeles and in other cities of the American West and Southwest.
Ressler took her camera into the lobbies and offices of the city’s recently redeveloped downtown. There, she found a variety of signifiers of the new American economy: symbols of class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the physical spaces and in the people who, though mostly unseen, are very much present in her photographs.
Vidal Sassoon (from the Los Angeles Documentary Project)
Bow Tie
While her earlier photographs often included people enacting typified roles in the new American economy, she eventually opted to exclude people in order to concentrate on the surface planes and symbolic objects in their of offices. Both approaches have powerful effects. While the inclusion of people allows us to recognize that real human activity (in all its messy details) goes on in these sites, the removal of people allows us to focus on the hollowness at the heart of corporate America.
Dead
System Development Corporation (SDC) (from the Los Angeles Documentary Project)
All of Ressler’s photographs in this book return us to a moment when the American West and Southwest were in full bloom, with the rise of the so-called Sun Belt shifting the center of gravity of the American economy, politics, and population away from the Northeast to the South and the West. Energy, aerospace, and high technology were some of the main drivers of the economic shifts taking place.
A&M Records (from the Los Angeles Documentary Project)
