Linda Connor

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.[5]

She attended the Rhode Island School of Design between 1963 and 1967 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.[2] In 1969, Connor began teaching at San Francisco Art Institute, instructing graduates and undergraduates for over 40 years.[6]

Her first group exhibition was Vision and Expression at George Eastman House, in 1968 in Rochester, NY.[2] 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.[1][7]

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.[8] In her later work, Connor adjusted her camera to provide much greater clarity and detail.[8] 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.[9] 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.[9]

.[10] In 2010, she began having her work reprinted in such varied formats as archival pigment prints, as an accordion-shaped book, and as large-format prints on silk.[5]

Like other women photographers working within the subject matter, Connor contends that men have traditionally photographed landscapes. She offers instead a "theory of women's landscape imagery, one that posits a more intimate, emotional response to Nature because women somehow have more affinity with it."[21](Deborah Bright, p. 138) In a public lecture, Connor refers to photographer Gretchen Garner's thesis, "Reclaiming Paradise," Connor stated that male landscape photographers aim to 'conquer' the land with their photographs.[22] Connor stated “is it too farfetched... to link man's passion for new lands, high places, the challenges of nature, landscape photography with pissing? This is territorial claiming and marking at its most basic. And what better place to piss off of than the top of a mountain-marking a vista."[22] Although Connor's view has been criticized as "essentialist,"[23] she is not alone in believing that her landscapes convey a symbiotic relationship with nature.

• 2005 Honored Educator, Society of Photographic Educators[24]
• 2002 Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists
• 2001 Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists
• 1998 Best Book of the Year, 21st- A Contemporary Photography Journal, for On the Music of Spheres
• 1997 7th Annual LifeWork Award, Falkirk Cultural Center
• 1994 National Endowment for the Arts, Travel Grant
• 1988 Charles Pratt Award
• 1988 National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Grant
• 1986 Photographer of the Year, Peer Awards, Friends of Photography, Carmel, CA
• 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship[25]
• 1976 National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Grant[1]

• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL[50]
• Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ[51]
• International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA[52]
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY[53]
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA[54]
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX[55]
• Stanford Art Museum, Palo Alto, CA[56]
• Yale Art Museum, Yale University, CT[57]
• Vassar College Art Gallery, Arlington, NY[58]
• Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI[59]
• National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.[60]
• Yildiz University, Istanbul, TU
• Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, HI
• Canadian Center for Photography
• Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA[61]
• San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
• New Mexico State University Art Gallery, University Park, NM
• The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN[62][1]

Odds & Ends. Linda Connor. Edition One Studios, 2010

Odyssey. Linda Connor. Chronicle, San Francisco, California, 2008 ISBN 9780811865012[63]

Heaven / Earth. Linda Connor. Lodima Press / Michael A. Smith, 2008 ISBN 9781888899276

The Angle of Repose: Four American Photographers in Egypt. Emily Teeter. LaSalle Bank, N.A., 2002 ISBN 9780970245205[64]

Black & White Photography. Manifest Visions / An International Collection. Numerous contributing photographers/James Luciana. Gloucester, Massachusetts, 2000 ISBN 9781564966476

Aperture 157 Steps in Space. Numerous contributing photographers / Mark Holburn. Aperture, New York, New York, 1999 ISBN 9780893818791

Contact Sheet 97. 25th Anniversary Edition. Jeffrey Hoone, Deborah Willis, Carole Kismaric, Marvin Heiferman, and Gary Nickard. Light Work, Syracuse, New York, 1998 ISBN 9780935445046

On the Music of the Spheres. Linda Connor. Whitney Museum, New York, New York, 1997

Visits. Linda Connor. Robert B. Menschel, Syracuse, New York, 1996

Luminance, LUX III. Linda Connor. Center for Photographic Arts, Carmel, California, 1995 ISBN 9780963039323

Photography in the 1990s: Fifty Portfolios. CD-ROM. Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, 1995

Absorbing Light. Linda Connor/Michael Read. View Camera, July / August, 1994

Kyoto Journal: The Sacred Mountains of Asia. 1994[65]

Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography. Natural Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and the University of New Mexico, 1992 ISBN 9780826313645

Mexico through Foreign Eyes. Pilar Perez and Assoc., 1992

The Kiss of Apollo: Photography and Sculpture 1845 to Present. Fraenkel Gallery and Bedford, San Francisco, California, 1991

Spiral Journey. Linda Connor. Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois, 1990

Women in Photography. Constance Sullivan. Abrams, New York, 1990

Decade by Decade: Twentieth Century American Photography. Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, 1989

Marks in Place. Linda Connor. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1987 ISBN 9780826309754

Wanderlust. Work by Eight Contemporary Photographers from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Keith F. Davis. Kansas City, Kansas, 1987 ISBN 9780875296210

Linda Connor. Linda Connor. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982

American Images: New Work by Twenty Contemporary Photographers. Renato Danese ed. McGraw-Hill, 1979 ISBN 9780070152953

Solos: Photographs by Linda Connor. Linda Connor. Millertown, New York, 1979 ISBN 9780934354042[1]

• Connor, Linda (1979). Solos. Millerton, NY: Apeiron Workshops. ISBN 978-0-934354-04-2.
• Connor, Linda (1982). Linda Connor: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 20, 1982-January 2, 1983 (Exhibition catalog). The Corcoran Gallery of Art. OCLC 9885671.
• Connor, Linda (Winter 1983). "[Linda Connor, photographer. Women and Landscape Photography]". Aperture (93): 48–52. JSTOR 24473310.
• Connor, Linda; Solnit, Rebecca (1990). Spiral journey: photographs 1967–1990 (Exhibition catalog). Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. ISBN 978-0-932026-21-7.
• Foerster, Abigail (13 April 1990). "Linda Connor's journeys unveil bond of humans and nature". Chicago Tribune. p. 69.
• Foerster, Abigail (12 August 1990). "Spiritual terrain Linda Connor uses her camera to unlock the soul". Chicago Tribune. p. 3.
• Donohoe, Victoria (13 September 1992). "Through Pictures, Linda Connor Shows Her Own World View". The Philadelphia Inquirer. p. M 23.
• Marable, Darwin (June 1993). "Sacred places, sacred spaces". World & I. pp. 146–152 – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete.
• Burchard, Hank (31 December 1993). "Timeless Photographic Landscapes". The Washington Post. p. N39.
• Connor, Linda (1994). Luminance. Woodrose Pub. in association with the Center for Photographic Art. ISBN 978-0-9630393-3-0.
• Braff, Phyllis (15 December 1996). "Capturing the Elusive: Music of the Spheres". The New York Times.
• Connor, Linda (1996). Linda Connor visits: November 11 – December 31, 1996 (Exhibition catalog). Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery. OCLC 37546965.
• Junker, Patricia A.; McCandless, Barbara; Myers, Jane; Rohrbach, John; Stewart, Rick (2001). Gillham, Will (ed.). An American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum. New York: Hudson Hills. p. 270. ISBN 978-1-55595-198-6.
• Connor, Linda; Adams, Robert; Gowin, Emmet; Fox, William L. (2009). Odyssey: the photographs of Linda Connor (Exhibition catalog). Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0-8118-6501-2.
• Frischkorn, Shauna (1 April 2009). "Review: Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor". Library Journal. pp. 74–75.
• Feeney, Mark (9 July 2010). "Shining light on sense of sacred". Boston Globe.
• Bell, Kim (1 September 2012). "Images of Wonder: The Photographs of Linda Connor". Photographer's FORUM.
• Baker, Kenneth (21 December 2012). "Linda Connor enters a door Wyeth opened". San Francisco Chronicle.
• Heller, Jules; Heller, Nancy G. (2013). North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Routledge. pp. 132–133. ISBN 978-1-135-63882-5.
• Whittaker, Kim (7 February 2016). "Linda Connor-Outside of Time". Works & Conversations.
• "Linda Connor". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
• "Dots and Hands, Fourteen Window Ruin, Bluff, Utah". Smithsonian American Art Museum.
• "Linda Connor: Spiral Journey, Photographs 1967–1990". Museum of Contemporary Photography.
• "Linda Connor". Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
• "Linda (Stevens) Connor". Contemporary Photographers. Biography in Context. Gale. 1996.
• "Linda Connor". Contemporary Women Artists. Biography in Context. Gale. 1999.
• "Linda Connor". San Francisco Art Institute.