Retrospective

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.

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