Linda S. Connor American, 1944 - Born in New York City, Linda Connor decided to become a photographer in 1961 when she received the family's Argus CS camera. She studied with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A., 1967) and with Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (M.S., 1969). Connor's earliest works were biographical photocollages into which she incorporated found imagery and hand-colored manipulations. She then began creating still-life arrangements, often inserting her own photographs into the tableaux. She has worked most extensively with the 8 x 10-inch view camera, and for her first images using this format employed a soft-focus lens handed down to her from a great-aunt who had used the apparatus when studying with the pictorialist Clarence H. White. Contact printed and gold-toned, Connor's architectural subjects and landscapes have a mysterious, antiquated ambience. The work was published as a monograph titled Solos (1979). Retaining the large format, Connor has shifted to a hard lens for her photographic explorations of sacred religious sites and artifacts. For this quest she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1988) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), an AT&T Photography Project Grant (1978), a Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography (1986), an Individual Artist Grant from the Marin Arts Council in California (1986), and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award (1988). This pursuit has also taken her around the globe -- from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Guatemala to Bali, Nepal, Tibet, and India. Connor has had one-person shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (1982), and the Art Institute of Chicago and Gallery Min, Tokyo (1988). In 1990 the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago organized a one-person exhibition of her work, Spiral Journey, with accompanying catalogue. Since 1992 she has been printing from found glass negatives depicting astronomical views, juxtaposing those images with her own in a diptych format. Connor lives in San Francisco, where she has taught photography since 1969 at the San Francisco Art Institute. A.W.