Leland Rice studied with Don Worth and Jack Welpott at San Francisco State University, and was a founding member of the Video Dialogue Foundation, a group that hosted exhibitions in San Francisco between 1968 and 1973. In addition to his acclaimed practice as an artist, Rice has exercised a strong voice and perceptive eye in the photography world since the late 1960s. His role as an historian of the medium is widely acknowledged, and he has been equally active as a critic and a curator. Edna was included in the exhibition “California Photography,” shown at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. The exhibit was novel and unexpected as it introduced audiences to photobased work that was not simply objective or documentary. Given the current taste for staged photography, Rice’s composition appears almost avant-garde. The slouching young woman, her nylons torn, sits on a tattered couch. Is she stunned, or lost
in ennui? The artist tightly controlled the tonal patterns, particularly in the foliage surrounding the model, to a achieve rather painterly effects.