Dreaming (California and Beyond): High End, Low End, No End in Sight
Susan Ressler | Southern California, United States
Photographer: Susan Ressler
Exhibit Title: Dreaming (California and Beyond): High End, Low End, No End in Sight
Location: Southern California, United States
I'm sharing a selection from my recent monograph titled "Dreaming California: High End, Low End, No End in Sight" (Daylight, 2023), along with a few images from the monograph that preceded it, titled "Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America" (Daylight, 2018). These photographs provide a trenchant look at contemporary America and the issues that affect us today.
In both monographs I focus on wealth, power, privilege and social inequity. Using Los Angeles as a launching pad to leverage these ideas, I portray racial disparity, gender tension, the homeless, the wealthy, the glamor and the glitz. I've always felt one can see the future before it happens in LA, and that in the "Golden State" our aspirations, fantasies and foibles are especially visible. Using heightened color and composition to accentuate "hyperreality," I explore what I call the "sets, scenes, signs and shops" that illuminate our contemporary world, as well as the corporate board rooms and executives whose power and privilege in the US, during the 1970s, was without peer.
Set mostly in the LA metro area, but stretching as far south as San Diego, the photographs in "Dreaming California" lay out ideas culled from more than 10 years (2010 - 2022) of images. Via sets, scenes, signs, shops, and various "hoods," I explore not only the "real" estate and nitty gritty of Los Angeles, but a broader swath of rich terrain that references America and beyond. From High End to Low End, clearly there is No End in sight.
"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," my first monograph with Daylight Books (2018), examines the power elites in mostly Fortune 500 companies during the 1970s that were located primarily in Los Angeles. A subset of the pictures in this book were made for The Los Angeles Documentary Project in 1979 for that city's bicentennial. Funded by the NEA, this portfolio is now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum along with those by the seven other photographers on the project. They include John Humble, Joe Deal, Max Yavno, Robbert Flick and Bill Owens, among others. Each of us had a unique theme that guided our photo-essays on Los Angeles, and my theme was Corporate America.
In addition to the Smithsonian, the original gelatin-silver images from Executive Order are in the collections of LACMA, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. They are represented by the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California.
Susan Ressler
PO Box 276
Arroyo Seco, NM 87514
sresslerphoto@gmail.com
susanresslerphoto.com
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