Emma Ressel
Emma Ressel is a photographer from Bar Harbor, Maine, and is currently working toward her MFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In her project Glass Eyes Stare Back, she uses 4x5 film and collage to make fictional images of animals in nature, visualizing the disorientation she experiences living through environmental change. By layering aging taxidermy specimens in natural history museums with prints and backdrops, she seeks to create false and fragmented landscapes that are somewhere between dead and alive, familiar and fearsome, and removed from linear time. With the awarded film, Emma will work closely with collections at the Museum of Southwest Biology, focusing on specimens that are extinct, endangered, and significant to central New Mexico ecosystems. She will build large-scale, narrative photographs that speak to species displacement, grief, and the wonder of imagined futures.
