Odyssey
Introduction
Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor reveals the artist’s pursuit of diverse and compelling subjects in some seventy photographs taken over the past three decades. Traveling in the United States and around the world-to countries including India, Turkey, and Tibet -Connor frequently focuses on devotional sites and monuments, but she is also drawn to the spirit embedded in ordinary existence. Connor’s photographs distill the significance found in everyday life, focusing, for example on the purposeful way people arrange their surroundings, or how light transforms a space. Combining timelessness with a palpable sense of age and transformation, her images also reflect on photography’s relationship to time. Further, her work explores the dynamic relationship between the natural world and the sacred, capturing the settings, iconographies, and philosophies in which they intersect.
While Connor’s photographs have been widely exhibited and published, Odyssey offers a new way to experience them. The sequences of photographs in these galleries were designed by the artist and intersperse new work with some of her best-known images. They do not convey a linear sense of time or document specific places, but are intended to encourage viewers to engage their own associations and responses.
Connor uses a large-format view camera, which allows her to achieve remarkable clarity and rich detail. Her prints are created by direct contact of the 8x10-inch negative on printing-out paper, exposed and developed using sunlight. Toned and fixed with gold chloride, the prints have a warmth, luminosity, and delicacy seldom found in standard photographic printing.
Connor (American, b. 1944) studied with Harry Callahan at RISD (BFA 1967) and with Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago (MS 1969). She has been a California Bay Area resident and an esteemed full-time faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute for over forty years. Her work is held in major museum collections around the world and is richly represented in The RISD Museum.
All photographs are gelatin silver printing-out-paper prints, courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco.
Titles followed by an asterisk indicate that the photograph was made from a negative provided courtesy of the University of California Observatories, the Lick Observatory’s Mount Hamilton Plate Archive. The exhibition tour is organized by Hal Fischer Associates, San Francisco.
Jan Howard
Exhibition images
