Covering more than a half century of dramatic social and political change, Ressler’s Photographs is an important document that, through vivid images and an engaging narrative, provides insight and meaning to the complex world we live in today. Global in scope, but with a focus on the Americas, the book begins in the tumultuous 1960s just one year after the Summer of Love (1967), when the author was a young college student who photographed the counterculture, street life on New York City’s gritty Lower East Side, and icons such as Andy Warhol and later Nina Simone, among others. The book then catapults us into a First Nation reserve in Quebec, Canada, as we follow Ressler’s trajectory from novice ethnographic image-maker to mature photographic artist––a career that parallels and comments on the growth of financial empires and consumerism as well as shifting trends in photography itself.
Susan Ressler Photographs: 50 Years, No End In Sight is an impressive retrospective that traces over fifty years of artistic development. It includes six major bodies of photographic work introduced in her own words, complemented by two interpretive essays: one by Eve Schillo on Ressler’s California work, and the other an afterword by Mark Rice. Although some of the images appear in Ressler’s previous Daylight monographs (Executive Order and Dreaming California), many are published here for the first time. These include “At Owner’s Risk” (her Canadian First Nation photographs), “From Analog to Digital” (an account of photography’s transition from analog film to digital media), and “Beyond Borders” (work from Europe, Asia, and Israel). The book ends with “American Stories,” including South America and the export of US culture abroad, before Ressler comes home to Taos, New Mexico, where she lives and continues to make photographs today.
Susan Ressler: I am still stunned by what I saw and rendered in these early images. This one is the standout for me: two injured men are drinking whiskey in front of a closed and barred storefront; one is on crutches, and the other’s hands are useless because they are wrapped in thick bandages. The man on crutches, a good friend for sure, lifts the bottle to the other man’s lips. One man is Black, and the other is White, but it doesn’t matter. Race is no obstacle where they are concerned. And beneath the bottle, behind the metal barrier, is a newspaper page that’s been posted on the store window. In effect, a nicely coiffed white woman stares at me, framed by the two men in this drama.
SR: Just out of college and unsure of my next steps, I had decided to try freelance photography in Boston. I wrote music reviews for an alternative weekly newspaper (Boston After Dark) and was fortunate to gain entrée to top acts like Nina Simone, Bonnie Raitt, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and T-Bone Walker, to name just a few. It was wonderful to photograph and write about these artists, but at twenty-five dollars per published article, it wasn’t going to pay the bills. So, I also worked for professors at Harvard and MIT, which is where I met the ethnographic filmmaker Asen Balikci, renowned for his films of the Netsilik Eskimo (1968) that portray traditional Eskimo life on the Canadian Arctic coast.
With an added explanatory text and a sequence that continues to evolve, I’ve attempted to depict this group of Algonquian families with fairness and equanimity. Some of the pictures are difficult to view, but as I say in the portfolio text, there is also spirit and hope. I do not speak for these people; I try to speak with them. To educate and forge awareness can, in my view, create change.
Asen Balikci, a renowned anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, invited Ressler to photograph the Algonquian on a Canadian First Nation reserve in Québec in 1972 after graduating from college – a pivotal experience that determined the direction of her photographic career. But the work remained hidden for thirty-five years, until 2007, when finally re-presented in a box set with a carefully curated sequence and text. Susan Ressler Photographs is the first time this work has been published or shown.
EXECUTIVE ORDER: images of 1970s Corporate America
A selection of photographs from Susan's first monograph based primarily in Los Angeles and published by Daylight Books in 2018, prefaced with an essay by Eve Schillo, Associate Curator of Photography at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
By photographing the wealthy and powerful, Ressler made an about-face from her previous First Nations work, turning the classical tropes of documentary photography upside down. The following quote from The Economist makes that clear:
"At the beginning of her career, Ressler had been inspired by Dorothea Lange, the pioneering documentary photographer who took portraits of poor farmers during the Great Depression. But in 1972 a three-month stint in Northern Canada photographing Native American families plagued by adversity and addiction left her feeling disillusioned. She was uncomfortable with the imbalance of power that tends to exist between documentary photographer and subject, and decided to take a new approach. Rather than seeking out the powerless, she turned her gaze towards the powerful."
Imogen White, The Economist, April 20, 2018.
In 1977 I entered a bank to make a transaction
What I withdrew was a photograph
SR: These are the opening lines to Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America, my first photographic monograph, published by Daylight Books in 2018. That deceptively simple statement prefaced a collection of black-and-white analog photographs made in executive suites, primarily in the Los Angeles metro, culminating in 1979 with a fifteen-print portfolio titled The Capital Group (as in Das Kapital by Karl Marx). Marx (like me) saw the pursuit of purely material gain as exploitive and venal, writing, “The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.” Moreover, he was so concerned that in the modern world, capitalism’s excessive emphasis on profit would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, that he claimed “Modern society . . . greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.”
"For Ressler there are striking parallels to be drawn between the 1970s and today. “Now, in the era of Trump, we face the same dangers that ensue when corporations are deregulated and when profits ‘trump’ people,” she writes. In this photograph, a female worker sits, apparently serenely, at her desk. But there’s an uncanny look in her eyes. When you notice the envelope opener she wields like a dagger and the gigantic artwork depicting an “X” on the wall, you wonder if she’s plotting some kind of sabotage, and whether similar quiet rebellions are happening now in offices around the world." - The Economist
DREAMING CALIFORNIA: High End, Low End, No End in Sight
A selection of photographs from Susan's second monograph based in Southern California, primarily in Los Angeles, and published by Daylight Books in 2023.
For over four decades, Susan Ressler has captured Southern California in precise yet enigmatic black- and-white and in captivating yet crushingly color images. Crushing the idealization of California with her hyperbolic compositions that find the technicolor underbelly of the dream. Enigmatic in that their irony can go both ways: laughing with the absurdity of her subjects or forcing us to acknowledge (briefer guffaw) what we have bought into. It’s a challenge she has taken on for years, compelled by this bellwether region that is invariably initiating cultural shifts for the rest of the country...
I was first introduced to her work through imagery made for the Los Angeles Documentary Project, of which she was one of eight artists that the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned in 1979 to photograph the city during its bicentennial (a project that was initiated in several cities across the nation, commencing with the celebration of the United States Bicentennial in 1976). Ressler focused on the principal industries that defined Los Angeles—film, music, tech, and the military—and then cheekily portrayed them in fiercely banal spaces. Locations of power purposefully, quietly made less so, simply by her compositional ire. The leap from that moment to her ongoing color work is not nearly as far as one might expect. Positions of power are debated, who is consuming what is questioned, and all through an oblique lens." - Eve Schillo, Preface, Dreaming California
FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL
SR: From thick impasto oil paint to automated analog pictures––and then the next rupture: digital photography––And now AI, artificial intelligence. Machines seem to be on an assembly line, destined to replace the human touch, and perhaps even the knowing eye...
At first I was reluctant to adopt the new technologies...
In the mid-1980s, I was immersed in an analog photography project: a series of collages titled Missed Representations. Based on a feminist critique of female representation (with a play on the words “miss,” “ms.,” and “missed”—as in “overlooked”), I would physically combine postcard images of masterwork paintings with adverts culled from Women’s Wear Daily. After photographing the constructed images, I’d make 11” x 14” Cibachrome prints. My aim was to deconstruct the unequal power relationships that inhere in the Western art historical canon.
Both “660’s no match...is it?” and Woman by a Mirror query age-old tensions between fine art, photography, and the latter’s origins as a science. The Polaroid Sun 660 camera in my Ciba- chrome collage lays claim to the originary sun (light), and its pictures were one of a kind (like the unique heliograph captured by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, often dubbed the first photograph ever made). Paired with Matisse’s Green Stripe (1905) and echoing the stunning tear in the adjacent fashion model’s face, my image asks viewers to compare painting and photography, as well as standards of female beauty.
SR: When Harry N. Abrams released Art of the Electronic Age by Frank Popper in 1993, Chapter 4 on “Computer Art” was headlined by my image Earth I, with a full-page reproduction. The caption described the picture as “a constellation of symbols in praise of the earth.” Little did I realize then the future implications of such reverence as we confront climate change now. In essence, the computer in the ’80s and ’90s was, for me, a metaphysical tool that documented both the personal and political. It was imbued with mind, spirit, and purpose, reflecting my affinity with scholars like Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and cyberneticist, whose books Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature, first published in 1972 and 1979, respectively, touched me deeply.
BEYOND BORDERS
SR: It’s the Birth of Venus reincarnated––in truth, removed from the Taos Public Library where I saw her parked in the lot, covered in dust, and surrounded by extraneous details. She deserved better, or so I thought; hence I transposed her into a more fitting landscape, using digital technology to do so. Or perhaps I was the one transported! I did go “beyond borders”; the question is, did I transgress them?
...there’s the issue of ethnocentrism and the fluidity of borders to consider. Once one crosses borders and boundaries outside one’s ken, it takes chutzpah and insight to understand the “other’s” point of view...
I want to share what’s authentic rather than what’s been tainted by consumerism, blurring Europe’s heritage in a kind of visual Esperanto. One could be in Barcelona and see the same fashion venues as in Beverly Hills. In fact, I will make that point in this book’s final chapter, “American Stories,” since after all, as an American it may be impossible for me to see the world in any other way.
AMERICAN STORIES: Finding My Way Home
SR: This last section of my retrospective book begins and ends with a dance, as well as some searing implications. Here, two Argentinians dance the tango in front of the Perito Moreno Glacier, celebrating their national heritage while the glacier calves, breaking away from the massive ice shelf with loud reverberating crashes—even the third largest glacier in the world is not immune nor exempt from climate change...
And finally (dare you skip to the end?), here in New Mexico, Indigenous Tewa and visiting Peruvians on a cultural exchange also dance, evincing hope as they embrace in the wake of their collective pain.
SR: In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe, putting an end to most travel. That February, when the coronavirus was just beginning to rear its monstrous head, I was in Sardinia, Italy, in order to photograph Carnevale. It consists of numerous festivals, essentially “pagan” pre- Christian rites, that are known by Sardinians as Carresegare, an ancient term that literally derives from carre ‘e segare, to tear or cut human flesh. Unbeknownst to me, the gravitas of blackened faces (signifying the underworld), animal masks, and traditions reenacting the brutal sacrifice of a tragic victim, would portend an exploding pandemic that has transformed the world.
Susan Ressler
Susan Ressler is a renowned artist, author, and educator who has been making social documentary photographs for more than fifty years. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library and Archives Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and many other important collections. A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Ressler is internationally exhibited and published. She has published two previous monographs with Daylight Books: Executive Order (2018) and Dreaming California (2023).
