Linda Connor

Born: 1944

Biography:

Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
She has photographed 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, where she has taught since 1969. From 1985-1999 she also served as a board member for Friends of Photography until 2002. That same year, Connor then became founder & president of Photo Alliance.
Connor began working in photography at 17, exploring her interest in spiritualism. Her early photographic influences include Walker Evans, Emmet Gowin, Harry Callahan, Julia Margaret Cameron and Frederick Sommer.
She attended the Rhode Island School of Design between 1963-67 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 San Francisco Art Institute, instructing graduates and undergraduates for over 40 years.
Her first group exhibition was Vision and Expression at George Eastman House, 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 grants.
One of Connor's most notable images include a photograph of a ceremonial cloth carefully wrapped around a tree trunk in Bali, petroglyphs hidden in the cliff dwellings of Arizona, star trails in Mexico, and votive candles arranged for ceremonial rites at Chartres. In her early work, Connor used an 8×10 inch Century View camera with a soft focus lens as a mechanism to imbue her photographs with a sense of abstraction. 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. 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.
Connor prefers taking black-and-white photographs, not only because she can print them in the darkroom herself, but because she likes the translation of reality they provide. In 2010, she began taking digital photographs, which she has presented in such varied formats as archival pigment prints, as an accordion-shaped book, and as large-format prints on silk.
Some of Connor's photographs included petroglyphs. 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 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 Olsen House is a colonial farmhouse located in Crushing, Maine. The popularity of this farmhouse came from its depiction in painter Andrew Wyeth's famed Christina's World. Connor is not the only artist to take photographs of Olsen House. The location has also been photographed by such notable artists Paul Caponigro and George Tice. In 2006, Connor was commissioned to photograph the site by the Cincinnati Art Museum. 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 .
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 1967-1990 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 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 Emmet Gowin." 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 spiritualism, using an 8x10 inch view camera and printed on slow contact print paper.

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