Book Details:
Hardcover
ISBN-13: 9781954119369
208 pages; 150 Photographs
11.25 x 10.25 inches
$60 US
Covering a half-century of dramatic change in the socio-political and arts scene, Ressler’s Photographs is an important document that, through vivid images and an engaging narrative, provides insight and meaning to the world we live in today. Global in scope, but with a focus on the Americas, the book begins in the tumultuous 1960s 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 Nations 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 is an impressive retrospective that traces 50 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, Associate Curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the other by Mark Rice, American Studies scholar and professor at St. John Fisher University near Rochester, New York. Although some of the images appear in Ressler’s earlier 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 film to virtual electronic media), and Beyond Borders (work from Europe, Asia and Israel). The book ends with American Stories: Chile and Argentina (Patagonia), and coming home to Taos, New Mexico, where Ressler lives and continues to make photographs.
Susan Ressler is an author, educator and social documentary photographer. She has been making photographs for about 50 years, and her work is included in the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, the Library Archives Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and many other important collections. She has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, and has published two monographs with Daylight Books: Executive Order (2018) and Dreaming California (2023). Ressler edited the book Women Artists of the American West (McFarland, 2003), a scholarly anthology on under-represented women artists west of the Mississippi and was Head of the Photography Area at Purdue University, where she taught photographic practice, criticism and history from 1981-2004.
Eve Schillo is Associate Curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She has curated diverse exhibitions that have been featured in galleries dedicated to American, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Japanese, modern, and contemporary art, as well as those devoted to photography.
Mark Rice is an award-winning author and professor of American Studies at St. John Fisher University near Rochester, New York. He has published two books and contributed essays on photography and visual culture to scholarly journals such as History of Photography, American Quarterly, Exposure, and Reviews in American History.