Retrospective

Covering a half-century of dramatic change in the socio-political and arts scene, Ressler’s Photographs is an important document that, through vivid images and an engaging narrative, provides insight and meaning to the world we live in today. Global in scope, but with a focus on the Americas, the book begins in the tumultuous 1960s when the author was a young college student who photographed the counterculture, street life on New York City’s gritty Lower East Side, and icons such as Andy Warhol and later Nina Simone, among others. The book then catapults us into a First Nations reserve in Quebec, Canada, as we follow Ressler’s trajectory from novice ethnographic image-maker to mature photographic artist–– a career that parallels and comments on the growth of financial empires and consumerism as well as shifting trends in photography itself.