NEW YORK, NY.- For more than 40 years, Susan Ressler has been photographing affluence in America -- in particular, the power relations that inhere in corporate and consumer culture. In Executive Order (Daylight, April 2018), Ressler invites us to examine the executive boardrooms, private offices, and lobbies of businesses that became especially prominent during the 1970s in downtown Los Angeles and other urban environments in the Mountain West. Ressler's images provide a fascinating critique of corporate America during this period of explosive growth when profits were increasingly preempting people. Her work, which has an undercurrent of cool detachment coupled with a dose of irony, combines images devoid of people allowing us to see the hollowness of these modern work spaces, with portraits of employees playing the typical roles assigned to them in the new American economy.

The images in Executive Order preceded and were then a part of a ground-breaking 1979-80 National Endowment for the Arts sponsored survey entitled the Los Angeles Documentary Project, intended to document life in Los Angeles during its Bicentennial. Ressler was among eight noted photographers chosen to participate, and her contribution is now recognized as an epochal and historically important record of the growth of corporate America which still resonates today. The middle section of Executive Order presents twelve images from the NEA project (from a portfolio of fifteen) which Ressler describes as among the most sterile and isolating pictures in the series.

Unlike many of the other photographers of the 1970s who primarily photographed outdoors, Ressler brought the "New Topographics" aesthetic inside these soulless, claustrophobic business suites. There, she found signifiers of the new American economy at every turn - symbols of class, gender and racial hierarchies. Her 35mm camera zeroes in on the wall hangings, furniture styles and various totems of success that surround the rich and powerful.

In his in-depth contextual essay, award-winning author Mark Rice writes that Ressler's images "provide a glimpse inside a rising economic order as they reveal the reception rooms and inner sancta of premier corporate office spaces. They were made at a pivotal point both in the postindustrial shifts of the American economyand in American photography, when a younger generation of photographers grappled with questions of aesthetics and epistemologies. By bringing these photos to audiences now, Ressler provides viewers new ways of understanding the worlds of photography and American corporate culture as they intersected in her lens during the decade that brought us 'modern life.'"

Ressler writes about her work's relevance today: "In the era of Trump, we face the dangers that ensue when corporations are deregulated and when profits 'trump' people. Visualized to emphasize cool geometric sterility, these photographs critique the underlying social structures enabling wealth and power. They do so with irony, empathy and insight. They show us, that although fortunes may rise and fall, the systems of power and privilege are still fixed firmly in place."

Susan Ressler is a renowned artist, author, and educator who has been making social documentary photographs for more than forty years. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library and Archives Canada, and many other important collections. A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Ressler is widely exhibited and her photographs have been published in numerous catalogs as well as the journals Exposure, Ten.8, and Camera. Ressler edited and co-authored the book Women Artists of the American West (McFarland, 2003), a scholarly anthology that featured under-represented women artists west of the Mississippi River in fifteen groundbreaking essays by notable authors including Martha A. Sandweiss, Peter E. Palmquist, and Tee A. Corinne. In tandem with this book, Ressler developed one of the first online courses and web archives about women artists at Purdue University, where she was Head of the Photography Area and taught photographic practice, theory, and history in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts from 1981 to 2004. She is currently Professor Emerita, Purdue University, and continues to make photographs that critique consumer culture and other socially relevant issues that shape the world as we know it today. She makes her home in Taos, New Mexico.

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. He has published two books and contributed essays on photography and visual culture to scholarly journals such as History of Photography, American Quarterly, Exposure, and Reviews in American History. Rice's first book, Through the Lens of the City: NEA Photography Surveys of the 1970s (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), examined an important but previously overlooked endeavor to photograph American cities during the bicentennial era. Administered by the National Endowment for the Arts from 1976 to 1981, these surveys included the Los Angeles Documentary Project, possibly the most significant record of the Los Angeles area from that time period. 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 efforts to use photography to promote an American imperial agenda in the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century. It won the Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) Award for the social sciences, one of the most prestigious publishing prizes in the Philippines, and was also a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award in History.