Executive Order (Leather)

Executive Order is a trenchant look at corporate America, featuring portraits and office interiors shot during the 1970s in Los Angeles and the Mountain West. A daring critique of wealth and power, Ressler wields photography with humor and insight, and her work is especially relevant today. Susan Ressler is an internationally renowned photographer, author and educator. An NEA fellow, her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library Archives of Canada, among other important collections. Mark Rice is an award-winning author and the founding chair of the American Studies Department at St. John Fisher College near Rochester, New York.

Susan Ressler is a photographer, author and educator. She has been making photographs for more than 40 years, and her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library Archives of Canada, and many other important collections. She has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, and she has received two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships as well as other notable awards. Ressler authored several essays and edited the book Women Artists of the American West (McFarland, 2003), a scholarly anthology on under-represented women artists west of the Mississippi River. She was Head of the Photography Area in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Purdue University, where she taught photographic practice, criticism and history from 1981-2004. Ressler earned an MA and MFA from the University of New Mexico fine art photography program. She is Professor Emerita, Purdue University, and currently lives in Taos, New Mexico. 
 Career highlights and awards include: • Bronze Medal, PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Paris, for "Encountering Israel" book series 2015 • Honorable Mention, Director’s Choice Award, Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, CO 2015 • Honorable Mention, PH21 Gallery, Budapest, Hungary 2015 • SPE publication, Susan Ressler’ s "Los Angeles: High End" in Exposure, vol. 46:1 2013 • SPE Award for Excellence in Historical, Critical and Theoretical Writing in Photography 2011 • Harwood Museum of Art purchase: Abrivado (archival pigment print made in Nimes, France) 2011 • Library Archives of Canada purchase: boxed set portfolio of 1973 documentary of Quebec First Nations 2009 • Commentary on “The Capital Group” portfolio, Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s (Mark Rice) 2005 • Finalist, Willard Van Dyke Memorial Award in Photography, NM Council on Photography 2005 • Semi-Finalist, Gordon Parks Photography Competition, Ft. Scott, KS 2004 • Publication, Women Artists of the American West (editor and author of three essays) (McFarland) 2003 • Purdue University Academic Investment Grant (for distance learning development, women artists) 1997 • Society for Contemporary Photography Fellowship, Kansas City, MO 1993 • Commentary on digital art photography, Art of the Electronic Age (full page color reproduction, Frank Popper, Abrams) 1993 • Smithsonian American Art Museum acquisition, “The Los Angeles Documentary Project” 1990 • National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 1983 • Publication, “The Los Angeles Documentary Project,” Camera 2/81E, Luzern, Switzerland 1981 • National Endowment for the Arts Documentary Survey, “The Los Angeles Documentary Project” 1979

Mark Rice is the author of two books about photography and American history. The first, Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), examined an important but nearly-forgotten grant category administered by the National Endowment for the Arts from 1976 to 1981. The photography surveys sought to reveal essential facts about American life in the Bicentennial era by bridging the gap between documentary and art photography. Rice's second book, Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines (University of Michigan Press, 2014, and Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015) discussed one man's efforts to use photography in order to promote an American imperial agenda in the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century. His latter book won the Gintong Aklat (Golden Book Award) for the social sciences, one of the most prestigious publishing prizes in the Philippines. It was also a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award in History. Rice holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii. He is the founding chair of the American Studies Department at St. John Fisher College, in Rochester, New York, where he holds the rank of Professor. In 2007 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Can Tho University (Vietnam), where he helped develop a curriculum in American Studies.