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1982.LINDA CONNOR
American
Depictions of landscape are usually interpreted in
the United States within the framework of manifest
destiny, which declares human dominion over the
dense and bountiful wilderness. Since the late
1960s, however, Linda Connor has been the main
female photographer redirecting these views of
landscape. Her photography makes reference to
the spiritual and symbolic in a manner that over-
rides American notions of land ownership. Rarely
working in a series or sequences, her individual
works are worldly and engage in a touristic attrac-
tion that ultimately belies the experience of the
religious pilgrimage. Trips taken to the American
West, India, Turkey, and Hawaii materialize pho-
tographically as rare proof of the necessity of pre-
serving the phenomenon of the natural world.
During the 1960s and 1970s, as conceptual art was
on the rise, a number of photographers migrated to
the Southwest, where they began to redefine photo-
graphy’s visual role within the fine arts and larger
culture. Earthworks such as Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah (1970) influ-
enced conservationist sympathies towards the nat-
ural environment and generated new practices in the
visual arts, including developing the notion of pil-
grimage as a fine-arts experience. Known mostly
through photography, earthworks depended heavily
upon such documentation.
Within the larger sphere of society, in places like
Arizona, Utah, California, and New Mexico, where
modern subdivisions intersected desert environ-
ments, awkward change accompanied the growth
of cities such as Albuquerque. No longer standing
in for the divine or the sublime, contemporary
photographers of the landscape captured instead
deformity, an overtaking of nature for corporate
and urban development. Gathered in the famed
exhibition organized by William Jenkins, New
Topographics(1975), photographers (among them
Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, and
Joe Deal) exhibited a new breed of itinerant photo-
graphers far removed from the heroic recording of
nature’s grandeur accomplished by nineteenth-cen-
tury figures such as Timothy O’Sullivan and others.
This is the historical background against which
Linda Connor emerged, and bridging these two
tendencies, she worked in a style not easily grouped
with others. While her photographs insinuate a
mythology that is symbiotic with New Topo-
graphics photographers’ ideals of conserving geolo-
gical areas, her images tend to be strikingly personal
and evocative. Her influence extends to the success
of students, including Larry Sultan, William
Mebane, and Anthony Aziz, as well as the founding
of PhotoAlliance, a member organization based in
San Francisco that encourages artistic production
and collecting.
Born in New York in 1944, an adopted child,
which informs her later work, Connor studied at
Rhode Island School of Design with Harry Cal-
lahan and moved to Chicago to study under Aaron
Siskind and Arthur Siegal, receiving a Master of
Science degree from the Institute of Design at Illi-
nois Institute of Technology in 1969. Since then,
Connor has resided in San Francisco, and she tea-
ches at San Francisco Art Institute. Although she
studied with Callahan and Siskind, known for their
crisp, highly detailed styles, Connor predominantly
uses a soft-focus lens (sometimes mentioned as a
family heirloom) and a view camera. Her 8 10
inch negatives are contact printed onto printing out
paper and exposed by the sun. Her photographs
thus harken back to the early years of the century
both in the method of taking the image as well inCONDE ́NAST