- Title
- System Development Corporation
- Date Made
- 1980
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions
- Primary support: 11 × 14 in. (27.94 × 35.56 cm)
Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.64 × 50.8 cm)
Image: 8 1/4 × 12 1/4 in. (20.96 × 31.12 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2019.14.1
- Collecting Area
- Photography
- Curatorial Notes
Susan Ressler was initially inspired by social-realist photographer Dorothea Lange, whose iconic imagery defined the Great Depression. But in practice, Ressler was uncomfortable with the imbalance of power between photographer and documentary subject, so her gaze shifted from the powerless to spaces of power. The irony in the banality of these places—oil and tech companies, defense contractors, the aerospace, film, and music industries, all based in Southern California—drew Ressler in. Among them was System Development Corporation, considered the world’s first computer software company, founded in 1955 under the umbrella of the RAND Corporation. (It eventually separated off as a for-profit entity and went on to create complex computer-controlled systems for military use.) By the 1970s, when Ressler began this series as part of a National Endowment for the Arts initiative to document Los Angeles, a new genre of photography had emerged, labeled the New Topographics—referring to a focus on the mundane topography of the urban, or built, environment over nature, and often peopleless and deadpan. Ressler appeared to fall in with the New Topographics; however, her staging of both people and totemic objects places her work outside this definition. It also heightens a sense of these interior spaces as microcosms of society, complete with gender, class, and racial tensions.
Eve Schillo
2021
