Executive Order: Images of 1970s Corporate America is a collection of 50 black-and-white silver gelatin photographs and the first of three monographs she has published with Daylight Books.
It was launched in 2018, when it garnered significant attention.
It was featured in The New York Times Lens Blog, Esquire, The Economist, and the Financial Times, among others. The time periods involved are particularly germane: the photographs from the 1970s, made when corporate power had reached a new level of dominance; the book’s publication in 2018 during President Trump’s first term in office; and the present moment, when these photographs have once again become especially relevant on the global stage.
Author Richard Armstrong, writing from London for the Financial Times in 2018, noted: “What the offices of 1970s corporate America tell us about the future [is] a photographic flashback to an age of menace and optimism.” He wrote that “our culture cannot get out of the late 1970s—this moment never stops being a reference point, an inspiration, and a warning.” Referring specifically to Executive Order, he highlighted her “cool compositional sense” and “wicked eye for detail.” Armstrong suggests that, alongside the historical value of the images, it is the sense of “unease” that gives them their strength.
He also refers to the book’s afterword, written by American Studies scholar Mark Rice, who identifies the late 1970s as the period “when the economic rot really started to set in…” In his view, the images reveal rising inequality and the financialisation of what had been an industrial economy. The offices are adorned with “the various totems of success that the rich and powerful surround themselves with,” exposing the “absurdities and pomposities” of corporate life. Rice makes the implications for the present explicit: “the pictures foreshadow the rise of Donald Trump.” After citing Rice, Armstrong concludes, “Perhaps the sense of menace in Ressler’s pictures derives from the fact that we know, for good or ill, exactly what happened next.”
About Susan Ressler
Susan Ressler is a renowned artist, author, and educator who has been making social documentary photographs for more than fifty years. Her work is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and many other important collections.
A recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships, Ressler has been exhibited and published internationally. She has published three monographs with Daylight Books: Executive Order (2018), Dreaming California (2023), and a 50-year retrospective, Susan Ressler: Photographs (2025).
The retrospective book was awarded Best in Show at the 2025 International Photo Awards (IPA). [Official Website]
