TRW, El Segundo, California, from the portfolio Los Angeles Documentary Project

Susan Ressler’s photographs of polished boardrooms, private offices, and lobbies offer a humorous critique of American postindustrial social constructions. She created them for “The Los Angeles Documentary Project,” a multiartist photographic survey of the city funded and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980, the agency published a portfolio of the resulting images. Unlike the better-known male photographers who participated alongside her in the project, such as Joe Deal, Bill Owens, and Robbert Flick, Ressler brought the viewer indoors, behind the lacquered doors of corporate America. As her contemporaries grappled with the city’s urban and suburban landscapes, Ressler investigated the aesthetics of these spaces’ indoor counterparts. Methodically structured, Ressler’s images emphasize the geometric sterility of the interiors, drawing parallels between the aesthetics of the corporate inner sanctum and those of the rigidly restructured forms outside the window. —Gianni Valenti ’21, MRP ’22