Emma Ressel

Emma Ressel (born Bar Harbor, ME) works with a large format view camera to make lush still life photographs with food and taxidermy that complicate the boundaries between dead versus alive and nature versus artifice. She builds dioramas for her camera and repurposes her prints and classical paintings as backdrops to collapse linear time, complicate what is real and fake, and create imaginary worlds within each photograph. Her false and fragmented landscapes speak to the dissonance between how we imagine and how we actually experience interactions with nature. In her current work, she seeks to contextualize the wonder, displacement, and grief that is felt by her generation as we imagine our futures living through accelerating ecological collapse.

Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard College and is currently an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited at commercial and non-profit galleries throughout the northeast and has completed residencies at Lugoland in Lugo, Italy and at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. Ressel has been awarded the 2022 Film Photo Student Project Award, 13th Still Life Pollux Award, Magenta Foundation Flash Forward 2019, and the Stinnett Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection Award.

Ressel’s first monograph, Olives in the street, was published by Edizione del bradipo in 2017. She has contributed photography to publications including The New Yorker, Refinery 29, and Philadelphia Magazine, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She currently lives in Albuquerque, NM, where in addition to working toward her MFA, she teaches photography at the University of New Mexico.