Susan Ressler is a renowned artist, author, and educator who has been making social documentary photographs for more than fifty years. Her work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Library and Archives Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and many other important collections. A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Ressler is internationally exhibited and published. She has published three monographs with Daylight Books: Executive Order (2018), Dreaming California (2023), and a retrospective titled Susan Ressler Photographs: 50 Years (2025).
Statement:
As a social documentary photographer, the landscapes I make are few and far between. But I live in Taos, New Mexico because I love the mountains and this beautiful state, called “The Land of Enchantment.” So the “unexplained bird kill” I photographed in the snow at my house in 2020 is more in line with my documentary work: “Thousands of migrating birds have inexplicably died in the south-western US in what ornithologists have described as a national tragedy that is likely to be related to the climate crisis. Flycatchers, swallows and warblers are among the species ‘falling out of the sky’ as part of a mass die-off across New Mexio, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and farther north into Nebraska, with growing concerns there could be hundreds of thousands dead already, said Martha Desmond, a professor in the biology department at New Mexico State University (NMSU). Many carcasses have little remaining fat reserves or muscle mass, with some appearing to have nose-dived into the ground mid-flight.” (From the “Age of Extinction” series in “The Guardian.” Fortunately, I have not witnessed this “die-off” of birds since 2020.
