Artist Statement
My work is documentary. What matters is the cultural milieu of our times.
How does corporate culture impact us? What insights arise street-side, where the social landscape can be so telling?
I photograph in America and Europe: traditional festivals in France and New Mexico, and contemporary rituals (like shopping) in urban centers such as New York and Los Angeles.
OLD WORLD/NEW WORLD is the rubric that unites all my work. Consumerism, as evidenced in HIGH END and my new book, EXECUTIVE ORDER (Daylight Books, 2018), is my most recent focus.
Process Statement
I photograph private moments in public places: the relics of old Europe and the corporate logos/glitzy storefronts that brand urban sites today. Both are facades. Both are revelatory.
My work is not staged. I construct images in-camera. Color, Light, Form and Frame enhance life's small dramas, epiphanies for a world made hyper-real.
I am inconspicuous. My cameras are small digital and analog SLRs. Prints are archival pigment, and most measure from 11 x 14 up to 27 x 36 inches.
Susan R. Ressler is a photographer, author and educator who has been making photographs since the 1970s. She is Professor Emerita, Purdue University, where she taught photography practice, theory, and history from 1981 - 2004. An alum of the University of New Mexico (MFA 1986), she studied with Beaumont Newhall, Van Deren Coke, Thomas Barrow, and Betty Hahn among others.
Ressler's work is in many important collections, such as the Library and Archives Canada, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and is the editor of "Women Artists of the American West," a scholarly anthology published by McFarland in 2003. In 2011 she received the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) award for Excellence in Historical, Critical and Theoretical Writing. Publications include "High End," a series of candid but carefully constructed photographs made in exclusive shopping sites throughout SoCal from 2011 - 2015. A critique of consumer capitalism, this work has been published in the Spring 2013 issue of "Exposure." Ressler's first monograph, "Executive Order," featuring her 1970s silver gelatin prints of corporate interiors, has been published by Daylight Books, 2018.