Solos: Photographs by Linda Connor, New York, Apeiron Workshops, 1979
→Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, exh. cat., Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona (2009) ; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (2009) ; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix (2010) ; Museum of Art, Providence (2010) ; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Spring (2010) ; Point Light Gallery, Surry Hills (2011), San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2008
Linda Connor, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 18 June – 5 September 1988
→Linda Connor: From Two Worlds, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, 27 April – 30 June 2013
→Linda Connor: Gravity, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, 16 January – 28 March 2017
American photographer.
Linda Connor is best known as a landscape photographer who creates exotic and spiritual pictures in beautifully detailed black and white. In addition to working as a renowned photojournalist, she has produced photographic essays about astronomy for the Lick Observatory, California, and began teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969. During her studies under Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, then under Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago (1969), she travelled to India, Mexico, Thailand, Peru, Nepal, Egypt, Hawaii, and the southern states. She photographed people and landscapes, taking a particular interest in ruins, megaliths, and caves, specifically sacred places such as temples, cathedrals, Buddhist sculptures, and pyramids. While travelling through India and Nepal in 1979–1980, she became fascinated with the poverty, spirituality, and fusion between man and nature that she encountered there. After 1978, she photographed American caves as visual manifestations of the sacred. The artist is also known for her almost surreal pictures of Machu Picchu (Inca citadel in Peru, 1984) and her close-ups of trees (Tree Decorated with Ceremonial Cloth, 1991).
Because she works with a large chamber and glass plates, the edges of her photographs are faded and the tones dimmed, as if seen through a filter. Her tool of choice is often an old 8 x 10 inch camera with a soft focus. She develops her works herself in her garden, using natural light, a process that makes them aesthetically akin to 19th-century pictorialist photography. In the artist’s own words, she seeks to “explore the cultural boundaries between nature and the sacred”. Her choice to stay on the fringe of modernity in terms of documentary and technical style, her sense of the spectacular, and her enthusiasm for a diversity of cultures, make her a successor to historic American landscape photographers Frederick Sommer and Robert Adams.