Executive Order to High End: from Corporate to Consumer Culture
Susan Ressler | Los Angeles, California USA, United States
Organization: Susan Ressler Photography
Photographer: Susan Ressler
Organization: Susan Ressler Photography
Exhibit Title: Executive Order to High End: from Corporate to Consumer Culture
Location: Los Angeles, California USA, United States
For almost 50 years, I've been photographing affluence and wealth disparity in America -- in particular the power relations that inhere in corporate and consumer culture. My first monograph, Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America (Daylight Books) was released in 2018, and my second, Dreaming California: High End, Low End, No End in Sight (Daylight Books) followed suit in 2023. Currently, I am working on a 50-year retrospective of my work, from the 1960s to the present, also with Daylight Books, and scheduled to launch in 2025. The photographs in this exhibit will all be in the upcoming retrospective, but I've noted which are in each of my previous two monographs. This SDN selection therefore spans (and connects) past to present, while simultaneously deconstructing the social structures that undergird wealth and power.
"In 1977 I entered a bank to make a transaction. What I withdrew was a photograph."
So begins my book Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America (Daylight,2018), and so began my turn from traditional documentary to a more trenchant, incisive view of contemporary America. I've focused on documenting (and critiquing) corporate/consumer culture ever since.
But why revisit/revamp my work from the 1970s? It has relevance to Reagonomics, but why review what took place 45 years ago? Because now, in the era of those like Donald Trump, we face the same dangers that ensue when corporations are deregulated and when profits "trump" people. The correspondences between "then" and "now" are uncanny, and there is so much to learn from looking back.
As author Mark Rice notes in the essay that accompanies Executive Order, the 1970s was "a time of unease and despair, punctuated by disaster" that provides "essential truths about contemporary American life." He adds, "It's all here—upstart technology companies, defense contractors, law firms, financial firms, the film and music industries, and so on, and the economies of power, consumption, and leisure...Ressler's photographs...draw our attention to how we came to be where we are today."
The photographs I've chosen for this exhibit include some of those made for The Los Angeles Documentary Project, an NEA survey of Los Angeles that included portfolios by eight photographers for the LA bicentennial. Those works are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and in other important collections including LACMA, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum.
To trace the trajectory of my California photographs, I've also included a few color works from Dreaming California: High End, Low End, No End in Sight as well as my forthcoming 50-year retrospective, scheduled to launch in 2025 (and also with Daylight Books). These photographs began in SoCal shopping malls and the series was initially entitled "High End." In 2011, when I returned to SoCal to make these color pictures, it was like turning The Los Angeles Documentary Project "inside out." Made outdoors in brilliant sunlight and "digital technicolor" from 2011 to 2022, they seem to pull back the curtain on a stage set "now playing everywhere." I call it "apocalyptic shopping": Consumerism runs rampant and Capitalism holds sway. I hope viewers will look deeply at "how we came to be where we are today."
This past year, "Dreaming California" received first place for documentary series in the 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron photography competition, and an honorable mention in the International Photography Awards (IPA), also in 2023. "Executive Order" has been discussed in numerous online forums, including the New York Times Lens Blog, Financial Times, and Esquire. The original gelatin silver prints are represented by the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California.
Susan Ressler
PO Box 276
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514
USA
sresslerphoto@gmail.com
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