Susan Ressler | American, 1949 -
Susan Ressler is professor emerita at Purdue University and is co-author and editor of "Women Artists of the American West" (McFarland, 2003). She is an alumna of the prestigious MFA program at the University of New Mexico.
In 1979, Ressler, along with Joe Deal, Robbert Flick, John Humble and other prominent photographers, set out to explore her unique vision of the city of Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Documentary Project. For her contribution, Ressler investigated the interior spaces of corporate executive offices and boardrooms. She titled the resulting 15-image portfolio "The Capital Group." The work that formed the Los Angeles Documentary Project resulted in two notable exhibitions and an entire issue of Camera Magazine, published in February 1981.
Susan Ressler's recent social documentaries entail a trenchant investigation of American values. She has returned to Los Angeles to create a new series entitled "High End," published in the Spring 2013 issue of Exposure, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE). Ressler’s photographs are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library Archives of Canada, and Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, among others. She was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. In 2011 she received SPE’s Award for excellence in historical, critical, and theoretical writing on photography.