Susan Ressler Photographs: 50 Years, No End in Sight

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