Linda Connor
				American, born 1944
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Linda Connor has spent more than twenty-five years exploring and investigating exotic and spiritual places. A frequent visitor to India, Mexico, Thailand, Ireland, Peru, Nepal, Egypt, Hawaii and the American Southwest, Connor takes her 8 x 10" view camera on a pilgrimage into our history. What she reveals is a past filled with presence; a past which informs and molds our world today. Among her various images is a photograph of a ceremonial cloth carefully wrapped around a tree trunk in Bali; petroglyphs hidden in the cliff dwellings of Arizona; magnificent star trails captured in Mexico and votive candles meticulously arranged for ceremonial rites at Chartres. Linda Connor is a professor in the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute where she has taught since 1969 and is a founding director of the prominent Bay Area non-profit, PhotoAlliance. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later received her Master's degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Connor states: "the strongest and most consistent content in my work is the investigation of the cultural boundaries between the natural and the sacred." Her luminous photographs, taken exclusively with an 8 x 10 inch view camera, contemplate the poetry and mystery of ancient sites and the timeless realms of the spirit. Connor uses printing techniques that date back to photography's early beginnings. She makes contact prints by placing the 8 x 10 inch negatives on special paper, laying it outside in her garden, and exposing them to the sun acting as active agent in creating these prints. She then tones the prints with gold chloride. Connor does not manipulate the image. In part, her ability to capture light is what makes her photographs appear to reveal the presence of something holy. She is also involved in an ongoing project in which she prints historical images of the night sky from the glass plate archives at the University of California's Lick Observatory, some of whose negatives date back to the 1880s. Connor's photographs have appeared in numerous books, including Spiral Journey, published for her mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1990. She is the recipient of many awards including a 1988 & 1976 NEA and a 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is part of numerous collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.