Harvey Stein, a New York-based teacher and photographer, said he thought it took five minutes to properly view a good photograph. That seems like an eternity in this age of image-barrage that afflicts modern society. Consider. The Yahoo news photo editor sorts through 5,000 images each day in his search for compelling photos.

In this digital age, we are inundated with photographs. And the method of their presentation is changing. Adobe, the maker of image-manipulating software, now develops its platforms into a program targeting solely the digital screen, all but declaring the era of the printed photograph is dead — except for fine art photography.

But there is good news for those willing to search and go to museums that display fine art. We can still see great contemporary photographs in person, and one such photographer whose work demands long-viewing and careful consideration is Linda Connor, a San Francisco-based photographer and teacher who has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1969.

Ms. Connor’s education came under the instruction of Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. She was born in New York in 1944 and now lives in Marin County in a house whose interior has the tidy look of a museum, filled as it is with collected art objects from throughout the world.

I was able to catch one of her shows at the Palm Springs Art Museum. It was a rare treat, where Stein’s five-minute rule applied. Ms. Connor has graciously allowed us to feature several of her photographs, but do note, however, that like all fine art, the images are even more compelling when seen in person, where textures and other beautiful qualities of the work are more palpably present. She also took time from her busy summer schedule, as she is always working and teaching. Her work is currently on display at the Rhode Island School of Design, and future shows are in the works.

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Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor BY Linda Connor (Chronicle Books, 2008) From the Publisher: “In Linda Connor’s photographs, even the humblest subjects assume a visual radiance. From the clarity of her portraits and landscapes to her sunlight printing technique, Connor’s body of work evokes a sense of otherworldly serenity. Spanning three decades, this major monograph by an internationally renowned photographer captures sites of mystery and contemplation from around the world… intriguing subjects juxtapose the spiritual with the scientific and inspire our sense of wonder. With their complex interplay of light and shadow, the physical and ethereal, the elegant images within this monograph present an extensive selection from this intrepid photographer’s body of work. A three-way conversation between Connor and photography luminaries Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin, and an essay by acclaimed poet and scholar William L. Fox, complete this unprecedented volume.”

John Szarkowski, in his work, Looking at Photographs, 100 Pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, said of a photo by Frederick H. Evans, “While another photographer might with equal reason have seen the cathedrals as stone constructions, Evans saw them as light and space… elements in a structure of light.” It seems to me your work contains the same qualities. For any photographer light is a major element. Over the years I have learned to use light and have its meaning be useful in the picture. On occasion, light becomes the subject, or at least a major player. Not that I spend a great deal of time scheming those things. If you go out, most early evenings, anywhere in the world where the sun is shining, the light is fantastic. The shadows are longer, and you have this axial light, which strikes things. Windows and Thangkas (Ladakh, India, 1994) BY Linda Connor The last picture in my book, Odyssey, is one of a dark, small room that has the sun right in the window. I did the picture with a certain amount of spite because I wanted to make the picture and the light was impossible. I decided to waste a piece of film so I could remember it, and it turns out to be one of the best pictures I have ever made — and its only because printing-out paper has the ability to hold the detail tonally in places where using other papers it would be blown out. You’ve taken images in places such as Tibet and India using a large-format, 8×10 camera. Is that still your camera of choice? Well, yes and no. Now that printing-out paper is no more, I don’t have an interest in printing my 8×10 negatives on conventional paper. Since my new work is no longer contact printed, I have retired the 8×10 and started using a 4×5 Dierdorf. In the field it is much lighter and easier to get around with. On the printing side, I am still working with my older 8×10 negatives quite a bit, but am using them with new digital processes and printing them at a larger scale. Why did you travel to such far-away places for your photography? Curiosity. I love places that have a rich visual history. Once you go to India you discover that what the country has to offer is a lifetime pursuit in its own regard. It is such a complex and amazing place. For example, the region of Ladakh, in northern India, is a huge landscape; there is a sense there, a depth simultaneously of mystery, timelessness and history.

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You chose to take many photographs involving religious places or symbols. Why?

A lot of the places I photograph are culturally sacred places. I am attracted to things that are religious and have that iconography. I am not religious. My own thoughts on the matter come from the view that when humans developed the brain capacity to realize our scale and our relationship to life and death, in the scheme of things, we became so scared that we had to mitigate this fear. We have a capacity for rhythm and recognizing patterns and before we knew it we were making altars and creating chants and belief systems; these are the seeds that eventually evolved into the different religions. They come out of our awareness of nature at the deepest level. The ideas of entropy and relationship of nature to the sacred, I am very interested in that. Some of the rock art pictures where you have a canyon wall and marks, even the mark-making process remains a symbol of honoring or desire.

You obviously organized your images in a specific way at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. Was there reasoning to your organization? You put titles in one place, but not near the images. They were clustered at the end of a row of images.

I want the work to be on visual terms. I don’t want your first impression to be a rationale of the title. I like ambiguity which allows viewers to have their own association before I give them my own, or the factual one. This creates the opportunity for a slippage of logic that allows for new ways of putting things together. For example, I will place an image of a pair of hands next to a photograph of a temple. The shift in scale and shift in content is not jarring, but it is more poetic in the way it works. I want to create the opportunity for the viewer to experience a different kind of understanding, rather than practical and realistic logic, even though the individual pictures are quite descriptive and not particularly manipulated.

Did you travel to Palm Springs to oversee the installation?

No. This is where digital photography is useful. I sent a map of thumbnails to the installer. He laid out a sequence, took a digital snapshot and then sent me a .jpg of the wall. We then discussed the layout on the phone. It would have been easier if I had been there, but it worked pretty well as an alternative.

You displayed in Palm Springs many images, including some of galaxies photographed on glass plates from the archive of the Lick Observatory. How did these Lick Observatory photos come about?

I had learned when I moved to San Francisco that there was an incredible archive of glass plate negatives at the Lick Observatory. In the early 90s I got a bee in my bonnet to find a way to get access to the observatory archive and make some printing-out prints. The printing out process was a perfect printing technology to use with these historical glass negatives. I made contact prints by placing the glass negatives directly on printing-out paper and leaving them in the sun just outside the archive door. People coming to visit the observatory were always intrigued with what I was doing with all these frames out in the sun. Then I would bring the prints home to my lab to gold tone and fix them. Working this way allowed the negatives to remain safe and sound at the archive.

Tell us more about this paper and why you used it.

All the small, warm-toned prints at the Palm Springs exhibition were on printing-out paper. It has been around since the early 20th century. Printing-out paper mimics albumin prints, but it is already pre-coated, and you can only make contact prints with UV light or in the sun. It is what Eugene Atget used in his work. The image appears through the agency of the sunlight. To make a print you place the negative on top of the paper in a hinged wooden print frame with a glass top. Sunlight comes through the glass and negative to expose the paper. You can open half the frame to see how the print is developing. If it needs more time, you leave it out longer. This is similar to baking cookies, you check on them to make sure they aren’t getting too brown. The length of time to make a print varies with the available sunlight. For example, if in May it takes 32 minutes to make an exposure, on a duller day in November it might take twice as long and the results will vary. It defies technical precision, which is fine with me and my work style. I also learned over the years that it had a capacity to print totally blown-out areas that would have been almost impossible to do in a darkroom. Once the image is exposed onto the paper, it is fugitive and if left in open light will continue to darken. If kept from the light it can hold for months and can be used as a quick proofing method in this state. But to make the prints archival and permanent, they need to be toned with gold chloride, fixed, and properly washed and dried.

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How will you make additional prints?

That’s done. The problem is, the paper is gone. Kodak made it, and later other companies, but now it’s just not available. This means that I probably won’t be doing contact prints of any of my previous 8×10 work. I suppose if someone came along and was really good at making platinum prints and wanted to help me print them, that might be an option. But my negatives are made for printing-out paper and tend to be dense and contrasty, which doesn’t work well with standard black and white paper. I will probably scan some of that work and have it in digital prints. It was an extraordinary paper, but the pleasure and ease of putting a negative in a print frame and taking it outside in the garden to make a print is over.

Now I need to have drum scans made, the files resized and adjusted and have professional prints made. The only remaining hands-on activity now is in making the picture and developing the film. From then on it is machines and computers.

In many of your images, you obviously used a slow shutter speed; on occasion, people would move through the scene and become blurred, even ghostlike. Was this intentional?

That often happens, somewhat by chance. But, seeing how it worked — not that I like the term “ghosts” — a slow shutter speed does warp time. You could read it as human experience is impermanent and the natural world is more permanent, which I am fine with. There are a lot of ways it could be interpreted. I don’t want someone saying these are ghosts of the ancestors. Occasionally I would make a picture where I wanted it to happen, but more often than not it was an element of the situation. What I had hoped would stay still and not move, would suddenly take off. I have come to accept this. On my first trip to India I tried to make pictures that excluded people. That became difficult as there would be so many people and curious kids. People didn’t understand. Stuff just happens. I don’t believe you can be a control freak, especially in India. It was a good experience for me to accept what happens and sometimes you are given a gift, but you have to be there, you have to put yourself out there. You cannot demand that it will happen.

Would you consider yourself a technical expert?

I do have some technical skills but I am not a great technician.

What are you doing now? Do you still teach full time?

Yes. I teach graduate and undergraduate classes. I don’t teach technical courses. This summer I went to Peru for five weeks as a workshop leader, the first three weeks with a group of students from San Francisco Art Institute, and the last two co-teaching an open workshop with my friend, Lonnie Graham. We went to some astounding places, the ocean, mountains, and Machu Picchu. I had not been there since 1984. We had a very good outfitter, who got us around, and helped us with the language, and logistics.

I strive to teach a love for photography and the importance of being engaged in the world. I think photography creates the opportunity for a relationship between the individual artist and where his or her curiosity leads… It just has to be done seriously.

I strive to teach a love for photography and the importance of being engaged in the world. I think photography creates the opportunity for a relationship between the individual artist and where his or her curiosity leads… It just has to be done seriously.

How do you conduct travel workshops?

I offer a safe, well-planned introduction to a place and also make sure students have the freedom to explore. I will have follow-up with them when we get back in the classroom. If they were shooting digitally, I could see their work on a computer screen. A number of them, however, were shooting film. I wouldn’t see the results until later and then I would work with the students to help them find their strongest voice, or an idea, and maybe it is not just one idea. And then we help them edit in sequence and help them bring out the richness of their work.

How do you help a student find his or her voice?

Partly it is getting to know them, what other kind of art they resonate with, and looking at a lot of their work. Then it is helping them organize their work so that it is a little bit more fluent. It takes a long time to develop a voice. There is no easy answer to this question.

What do you stress in your teaching?

Some people just love being out in nature and have an interest in the landscape, for instance, and that seems very true to their psyche and their concern for the planet, whether they go to the documentary form, or ecological or poetic fashion. For me, as a teacher, it doesn’t matter — just so long as they are involved deeply. This applies to people who want to take pictures of their own family or self-portraits. It doesn’t matter. It just has to be done seriously.

What do you think of the digital revolution?

(After a long sigh) I can’t keep up with it. It is here, and I am pleased to say that a good number of my students are keen and good at it, and I depend on their skills to help me out. It is like any tool or aspect. Certainly, some of the things you can do with digital images are amazing and fantastic, like scale and tonal corrections, or alterations. A couple of my students are doing some altered work that is quite sophisticated and uncanny. I have seen other stuff that is just stupid.

What is your involvement with the San Francisco Photo Alliance?

I had been a board member of Friends of Photography for many years, and, when the group finally gave up the ghost, it left a very big crater in the art community in San Francisco. I gathered a few like-minded people, got together and started a non-profit, and called it Photo Alliance. We got some starter money from Paul Sack, who is a tremendous supporter of photography in the Bay Area.

We made arrangements to use the Art Institute’s lecture hall, which is a nice size for us. It can hold up to 250 people. We decided to have a book signing next door for the artist, and then we got smarter, and decided to have family-style dinner before the lecture. In our eight years of existence we still don’t have a permanent home or office.

The students at the school can attend lectures for free. For other students, we have a special discounted price. We do an introductory lecture where we have, often, an emerging artist, an artist who is not well-known, and that person does a fifteen-minute talk about his or her work. We try to coordinate the introductory lecture so that it is a good match with the main speaker. We offer workshops. One of our founding principles is to have more collaborative and shared spaces. We are dedicated to staying lithe and flexible.

We also partner with Arts Commission in San Francisco, and we have worked with them to create a number of exhibitions. We will have one show on night photography this fall. Each March we have a portfolio review. This allows emerging photographers to get their work in front of the eyes of a number of well-known photographers and curators. We have an affordable collector print program, which encourages people to put some beautiful work on their walls, and at the same time support the organization.

Finally, Aaron Siskind^[1] and Harry Callahan.^[2] These were you two principal early teachers. How did they help you?

I got to work with two dedicated artists who were also teachers. They were first and foremost innovative and tremendously hardworking artists. The main thing was knowing their love for photography and for art and the energy it demanded if you are going to make a lifetime activity of it. They gave me a lot of personal encouragement. I think they recognized that I had a real passion for photography, not only my own work, but also the history of photography and the work of others. I just love photographs.