“I never expected to become a photographer when a friend put a Rolleiflex camera in my hands,” writes Susan Ressler (born 1949 in Philadelphia) of her introduction to photography in 1968. Coming of age during an era of “tumultuous” political and social change, from the “pervasive unrest and idealism” of 1960s counterculture to the mounting violence of the Vietnam War, Ressler has spent the past five decades documenting stark disparities of power, depicting “the haves to the have-nots”, as she puts it, “and how in America, they coexist with dis-ease”.
Fifty Years, No End in Sight offers a comprehensive overview of Ressler’s contribution to American photography, accompanied by her own reflections. From her famous series of corporate boardrooms in 1970s Los Angeles and intimate portraits of First Nations families in Canada to her ongoing engagement with the sprawling, hyper-real environments of Southern California, No End in Sight presents an artist who routinely challenges, in the words of Los Angeles County Museum of Art associate curator Eve Schillo, “the myths and realities of our everyday… to see through our fictions that often pose as facts”.
Photos hidden for 35 years
Graduating from the University of New Mexico in the early 1970s, Ressler accepted an invitation from the anthropologist Asen Balikci to document Algonquian communities in rural Quebec. “The experience was so profound that not only did it convince me to pursue photography to this day,” she writes, “but the pictures I made then remained hidden for 35 years.” Ressler expresses regret at her youthful naivety, unaware of “the complexities of documentary photography”, a medium that risks exploiting subjects for the sake of one-sided or biased stories. Taken in 1972, Ressler’s photographs of the Algonquian were first published in 2007 as a limited boxed set. A selection from the series is reproduced in this book,…
