Diver © Susan Ressler
Every era inspires its own brand of nostalgia, but the emotional pull of the 1970s is uniquely strong. It is not even the whole decade that has such a hold: our culture cannot get out of the late 1970s in particular — an era located, spiritually, somewhere in the vicinity of California. In music, design, fashion and film, this moment never stops being a reference point, an inspiration and a warning.
Honeywell (from the Los Angeles Documentary Project) © Susan Ressler
Executive Order, a new collection of photographs taken by Susan Ressler in urban areas of California between 1977 and 1980, is a window into this brief but important time. Her pictures of corporate offices and boardrooms in downtown Los Angeles combine a cool compositional sense with a wicked eye for detail. My overwhelming first impression was (naturally, for someone in their forties) the gut tug of images made around the time of my earliest memories.
Tape © Susan Ressler
My second response was to notice (as an adult and an office worker) the continuities with the present day. Office art, for example, tends to dismal abstraction, then and now. And the office plant, that potent symbol of workday ennui, is eternal: a discouraged and drooping Dracaena or Aglaonema, here and there a cactus or a succulent, looking lost.
Yet it is the discontinuities with the present day that ultimately hold the attention. Ressler is adept at showing the way office design and office technology relate. It is a relationship that has undergone deep change in the intervening decades.