Susan Ressler

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.