Linda Connor (born in New York, November 18, 1944) is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography. She has photographed in a multitude of countries throughout her career including, but not limited to, India, Mexico, Thailand, Ireland, Peru, and Nepal. Connor is a professor for the Photography Department at the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

, where she has taught since 1969. From 1985 to 1999 she also served as a board member for

Friends of Photography Friends of Photography was a nonprofit organization started by Ansel Adams and others in 1967 to promote photography as a fine art. During its existence the organization held at least 330 photography exhibitions at its galleries in Carmel and San Fr ...

. That same year, Connor then became founder & president of Photo Alliance.

Early life and career

Connor began working in photography at 17, exploring her interest in

spiritualism Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spiritualism (when not lowercase) ...

. Her early photographic influences include

Walker Evans Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from ...

Emmet Gowin Emmet Gowin (born 1941) is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photogr ...

, Harry Callahan,

Julia Margaret Cameron Julia Margaret Cameron (''née'' Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian m ...

and

Frederick Sommer Frederick Sommer (September 7, 1905 – January 23, 1999), was an artist born in Angri, Italy and raised in Brazil. He earned a M.A. degree in Landscape Architecture (1927) from Cornell University where he met Frances Elizabeth Watson (1904–1999 ...

. She attended the

Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...

between 1963 and 1967 where she received a BFA in Photography. She later attended the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology between the years of 1967–1969, where she received her MFA. In 1969, Connor began teaching at

, instructing graduates and undergraduates for over 40 years. Her first group exhibition was ''Vision and Expression'' at

George Eastman House The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as ''George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film'', the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in ...

, in 1968 in Rochester, NY. In the entirety of her career she has received 11 awards, held over 40 solo exhibitions, and was featured in over 20 group exhibitions. These awards include a Guggenheim and three

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

grants.

Style and technique

One of Connor's most notable images include a photograph of a ceremonial cloth carefully wrapped around a tree trunk in Bali,

petroglyphs A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

hidden in the cliff dwellings of Arizona, star trails in Mexico, and votive candles arranged for ceremonial rites at

Chartres Chartres () is the prefecture of the Eure-et-Loir department in the Centre-Val de Loire region in France. It is located about southwest of Paris. At the 2019 census, there were 170,763 inhabitants in the metropolitan area of Chartres (as d ...

. In her early work, Connor used an 8×10 inch Century View camera with a

soft focus In photography, soft focus is a lens flaw, in which the lens forms images that are blurred due to spherical aberration. A soft focus lens deliberately introduces spherical aberration in order to give the appearance of blurring the image while ...

lens as a mechanism to imbue her photographs with a sense of abstraction.Alicia Miller. Linda Connor at Falkirk Cultural Center. Artweek, 28, June 1997 In her later work, Connor adjusted her camera to provide much greater clarity and detail. To achieve a sense of the mystical with a sharp lens, however, Connor photographed items and structures that are already perceived as mystical in themselves.R. Whittaker. Linda Connor—Outside of Time. Works and conversations, February 7, 2016. http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=449 In India and Nepal, she found sacred landscapes with ritual magic that she could photograph with a sharp lens and still achieve a sense of timelessness. Connor’s books present her photographs without titles (which are given at the end of her books) and with the places mixed up in no recognizable geographic or chronological order according to emotion and tone. . In 2010, she began having her work reprinted in such varied formats as archival pigment prints, as an accordion-shaped book, and as large-format prints on silk.

Prominent works

Petroglyphs

Some of Connor's photographs included

petroglyph A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

s. Connor and four other photographs attempted to preserve the petroglyphs photographically, resulting in the book, ''Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Prehistoric Rock Art'' (1988). A 1996

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

essay asserted that the photos "combine generalized forms, like shadows and silhouettes, with richly compelling detail." Connor captures man-made elements in natural environments in order to evoke spiritualism, "addressing quite literally the issue of how people have made their mark upon the landscape."

The Olson House

The Olson House is a colonial farmhouse located in Cushing, Maine. The popularity of this farmhouse came from its depiction in painter

Andrew Wyeth Andrew Newell Wyeth ( ; July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. In his ...

's famed

Christina's World ''Christina's World'' is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the mid-20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treel ...

. Connor is not the only artist to take photographs of Olson House. The location has also been photographed by such notable artists

Paul Caponigro Paul Caponigro (born December 7, 1932), is an American photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Early life Caponigro started having interests in photography at age 13. However, he also had a strong passion in music and began to study music at B ...

and

George Tice George A. Tice (born 1938) is an American photographer. His work depicts a broad range of American life, landscape, and urban environment, mostly photographed in his native New Jersey. He has lived all his life in New Jersey, except for his serv ...

. In 2006, Connor was commissioned to photograph the site by the

Cincinnati Art Museum The Cincinnati Art Museum is an art museum in the Eden Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1881, it was the first purpose-built art museum west of the Alleghenies, and is one of the oldest in the United States. Its collection of ov ...

. Though a few of her photographs of the Olson House reference Wyeth, her depiction nonetheless accomplishes the difficult task of being distinctive and separate from Wyeth's .

Spiral Journey and Odyssey

Connor collected her life's photographic projects in two books, one titled ''Spiral Journey'' and the other titled ''Odyssey: Photographs by Linda Connor''. ''Spiral Journey'' is an extensive retrospective book and exhibitions of her photographs made between 1967 and 1990 in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. ''Odyssey: Photographs by Linda Connor'' is another retrospective book and exhibitions published by

Chronicle Books Chronicle Books is a San Francisco-based American publisher of books for adults and children. The company was established in 1967 by Phelps Dewey, an executive with Chronicle Publishing Company, then-publisher of the ''San Francisco Chronicle''. ...

in 2008 containing 133 photographs. The exhibitions toured across art museums in the US from 2008 – 2011 with a monograph containing "transcripts of conversations between Connor, Robert Adams and

." These retrospectives make clear that Connor's primary interest has been exploring places "steeped in the passage of time and resonant with spirituality.” Both works primarily consist of landscape photography in relation to culture and to

, using an 8x10 inch view camera and printed on slow

contact print A contact print is a photographic image produced from film; sometimes from a film negative, and sometimes from a film positive or paper negative. In a darkroom an exposed and developed piece of film or photographic paper is placed emulsion si ...

paper.

Feminism in landscape photography

Like other women photographers working within the subject matter, Connor contends that men have traditionally photographed landscapes. She offers instead a "theory of women's landscape imagery, one that posits a more intimate, emotional response to Nature because women somehow have more affinity with it."(

Deborah Bright Deborah Bright (born 1950) is a 20th-century American photographer and artist, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photog ...

, p. 138) In a public lecture, Connor refers to photographer Gretchen Garner's thesis, "Reclaiming Paradise," Connor stated that male landscape photographers aim to 'conquer' the land with their photographs. Connor stated “is it too farfetched... to link man's passion for new lands, high places, the challenges of nature, landscape photography with pissing? This is territorial claiming and marking at its most basic. And what better place to piss off of than the top of a mountain-marking a vista." Although Connor's view has been criticized as "essentialist," she is not alone in believing that her landscapes convey a

symbiotic Symbiosis (from Greek , , "living together", from , , "together", and , bíōsis, "living") is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasit ...

relationship with nature.

Awards

*2005 Honored Educator, Society of Photographic Educators *2002 Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists *2001 Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists *1998 Best Book of the Year, 21st- A Contemporary Photography Journal, for On the Music of Spheres *1997 7th Annual LifeWork Award, Falkirk Cultural Center *1994 National Endowment for the Arts, Travel Grant *1988 Charles Pratt Award *1988 National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Grant *1986 Photographer of the Year, Peer Awards, Friends of Photography, Carmel, CA *1979

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

*1976 National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Grant

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

2017 LINDA CONNOR – Photographs, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA 2017 Linda Connor: Gravity, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, FL 2013 Linda Connor: From Two Worlds, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA 2013 Linda Connor: Continuum, Candela Books + Gallery, Richmond, VA 2012 Linda Connor, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA 2012 From Two Worlds, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2011 Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, Point Light Gallery, Surry Hills, Australia 2011 Linda Connor: New Direction, Viewpoint Gallery, Sacramento, CA 2010 Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA 2010 Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 2010 Linda Connor, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA 2010 Linda Connor: New Work, Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR 2009 Odyssey: the photographs of Linda Connor, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ 2009 Odyssey: the photographs of Linda Connor, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ 2009 Linda Connor, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, CA 2009 Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona, FL 2008 Himalayas, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2007 Linda Connor Photographs, Sacramento State University, Sacramento, CA 2007 Olson House Photographs, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH 2007 Linda Connor, Department of Design Gallery, Mariposa Hall, Sacramento State, Sacramento, CA 2006 Linda Connor Photographs, Sun Valley Art Museum, Ketchum, ID 2005 A Clear Vision” by Linda Connor, The Creative Center for Photography Freestyle, Los Angeles, CA 2004 Linda Connor: Starfields & Constellations, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY 2003 Linda Connor: Continuum, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2003 Time, Place, Sequences, Sonoma Museum of Visual Art at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, Santa Rosa, CA 2003 Linda Connor: Photographs, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo Japan 2001 Linda Connor, Glen Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, NY 2001 The Heavens, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA 2001 Recent Photographs, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2001 Towards Light, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY 1997 Linda Connor, Life Work Award, Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, CA 1997 Linda Connor, PARTS Photographic Arts, Minneapolis, MN 1997 Linda Connor, Spectrum Gallery, Fresno, CA 1996 Linda Connor – Diptychs, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1994 Earthly Constellations, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1993 Earthly Constellations, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA 1992 Harry Callahan & Linda Connor, Light Factory, Charlotte, NC 1992 Earthly Constellations, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA 1990 Spiritual Journey, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL 1988 Linda Connor, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1988 Gallery Min, Tokyo, Japan 1986 Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, California 1982 Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 1973 Light Gallery, New York City, N.Y.

Group exhibitions

2018 Speak to the Stones, and the Stars Answer, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2017 Shadowland: Photographs from the Collection, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO 2017 Pop- Up, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA 2017 Maija Fiebig, Thuy-Van Vu and Linda Connor, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA 2017 The Poetry of Place, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH 2017 The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH 2016 LUX: The Radiant Sea, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY 2015 Regarding Trees: Vintage and Contemporary Selections, Joseph Bellows Gallery, San Diego, CA 2015 The Mapmaker's Dream, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2015 DWELL, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA 2014 Local Treasures: Bay Area Photography,

Berkeley Art Center Berkeley Art Center (BAC) is a nonprofit arts organization, community art space, and gallery founded in 1967 and located at 1275 Walnut Street in Live Oak Park, Berkeley, California. History The Berkeley Art Center building was built by the B ...

, Berkeley, CA 2014 Starstruck: The Fine Art of Astrophotography, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA 2012 SOLAR, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 2012 When Heaven Meets Earth, Datz Museum of Art, Gwangju-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea 2012 Tracing Light, Datz Museum of Art, Gwangju-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea 2012 Growth & Gravity: Linda Connor & Yoshitomo Saito, Goodwin Fine Art Gallery, Denver, CO 2012 Consilience: Photographers Operating at the Intersection of Art & Science, International Center of Photography, New York, NY 2000 Three Landscape Photographers, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1994 Allan Chasanoff Photographic Collection: Tradition and the Unpredictable, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX 1994 Selections from the Permanent Collection: Image and Text, Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 1993 Mexico through Foreign Eyes, International Center for Photography, New York 1991 Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC 1990 Photographs by American Women Artists, California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside, Riverside, CA 1988 Landscapes from the Permanent Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 1986 Artist in Mid-Career, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA 1985 American Images, Photography 1945–80, Barbican Art Gallery, London, England 1982 The Contact Print, Friends of Photography, Carmel, CA 1979 American Photography in the '70, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1977 Mirrors and Windows – American Photography Since 1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY 1968 Vision and Expression, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

Collections

*Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL *Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ *International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY *J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA *Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY *National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON *Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England *San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA *Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX *Stanford Art Museum, Palo Alto, CA *Yale Art Museum, Yale University, CT *Vassar College Art Gallery, Arlington, NY *Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI *National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. *Yildiz University, Istanbul, TU *Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, HI *Canadian Center for Photography *Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA *San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA *New Mexico State University Art Gallery, University Park, NM *The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN

Bibliography

Odds & Ends. Linda Connor. Edition One Studios, 2010 Odyssey. Linda Connor. Chronicle, San Francisco, California, 2008 Heaven / Earth. Linda Connor. Lodima Press / Michael A. Smith, 2008 The Angle of Repose: Four American Photographers in Egypt. Emily Teeter. LaSalle Bank, N.A., 2002 Black & White Photography. Manifest Visions / An International Collection. Numerous contributing photographers/James Luciana. Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2000 Aperture 157 Steps in Space. Numerous contributing photographers / Mark Holburn. Aperture, New York, New York, 1999 Contact Sheet 97. 25th Anniversary Edition. Jeffrey Hoone, Deborah Willis, Carole Kismaric, Marvin Heiferman, and Gary Nickard. Light Work, Syracuse, New York, 1998 On the Music of the Spheres. Linda Connor. Whitney Museum, New York, New York, 1997 Visits. Linda Connor. Robert B. Menschel, Syracuse, New York, 1996 Luminance, LUX III. Linda Connor. Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, California, 1995 Photography in the 1990s: Fifty Portfolios. CD-ROM. Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, 1995 Absorbing Light. Linda Connor/Michael Read. View Camera, July / August, 1994 Kyoto Journal: The Sacred Mountains of Asia. 1994 Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography. Natural Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the University of New Mexico, 1992 Mexico through Foreign Eyes. Pilar Perez and Assoc., 1992 The Kiss of Apollo: Photography and Sculpture 1845 to Present. Fraenkel Gallery and Bedford, San Francisco, California, 1991 Spiral Journey. Linda Connor. Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois, 1990 Women in Photography. Constance Sullivan. Abrams, New York, 1990 Decade by Decade: Twentieth Century American Photography. Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, 1989 Marks in Place. Linda Connor. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1987 Wanderlust. Work by Eight Contemporary Photographers from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Keith F. Davis. Kansas City, Kansas, 1987 Linda Connor. Linda Connor. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982 American Images: New Work by Twenty Contemporary Photographers. Renato Danese ed. McGraw-Hill, 1979 Solos: Photographs by Linda Connor. Linda Connor. Millertown, New York, 1979