standing with the beer bottles? I didn’t want to be seen as exploiting these people. It’s a very touchy situation about how you would present the work, how these images would be seen and how it would be contextualized. I see now that there’s so much empathy in those pictures that I took. They’re not sensational at all. But it took me a really long time to see it.” That ambivalence eventually led Ressler to corporate America and the work that fills “Executive Order.” “I had this idea,” she says. “What would happen if I photograph the wealthy and powerful?” When she was finished in Los Angeles, Ressler got a job teaching at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, and that led to a faculty position in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Purdue University in Indiana, where she taught photography from 1981 to 2004. Like a lot of people, especially artists, Ressler was in love with New Mexico and wanted to return. She also came to realize that a master’s in fine arts would help her advance in academia. So she strung together some leaves of absence and came back to UNM for an MFA. Ressler had always shot with a small 35-millimeter camera and most of her photos were taken without the use of a tripod or a flash. When she returned to UNM, digital photography was beginning to take hold. Ressler was suspicious of the quality of digital and resisted making the transition. (She didn’t start shooting digital until the 2000s.) But she was open to experimenting in other ways and using other tools. She created a series called “Missed Representations” during her MFA. She took photographs of women from “Women’s Wear Daily” magazine and photographs of famous masterwork paintings that featured women and created collages, and then photographed them. In addition to those colorful mash-ups, some of which hang in Ressler’s home today, she also used video cameras to take screen captures, pieced those in with still images and photographed those.
She completed her MFA in 1986, penning a dissertation on combat photographer Robert Capa. While exploring new technologies in her second stint in graduate school, she was also exploring New Mexico and finding the area around Taos especially captivating. Ressler bought property there and today, retired from Purdue and a full-time New Mexican, she lives with her tabby Fiona in a house in Upper Des Montes outside of the village of Arroyo Seco. It is minimal but warm, and filled with light from windows that frame views of mountains and mesas. Her commute to work is quick—a short walk across the driveway to the studio where she is in the process of organizing a career’s worth of prints and negatives and digital collections while continuing to pursue new projects. She shoots today with a small Panasonic Lumix, a Micro Four-Thirds camera that allows her to work unobtrusively. Recently returned from three weeks in Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, Ressler is researching indigenous Buddhist communities for a return trip to focus on isolated communities and traditions. Putting together “Executive Order” gave Ressler an opportunity to review some of her earliest work, and she was surprised to find forgotten and never-
printed images—and to see familiar images in a new light with the benefit of age and experience. “I started going through boxes of work discovering pictures I didn’t even remember I had taken. It was an amazing experience. I had hundreds and hundreds of images. Some of them I had rejected and some of them I just didn’t see how interesting they were. Sometimes you get so much insight into things after time has gone by.” Although she never had a big-name New York art career and became represented by a major gallery only a few years ago, Ressler looks around the work displayed in her studio with satisfaction. “I’ve had a full career,” she says. “I’ve done so many kinds of work which has really been about humanity and sometimes social commentary about issues that I think are important and I often find disturbing. The Canadian Indian work, the corporate work—it’s all the same thread. I love photographing the humanity of people.” ❂
Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America is available at amazon.com
Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)
FALL 2018
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