Mark Ruwedel

Ruwedel is a landscape photographer. He photographs the "material residue or evidence of massive invisible forces at work on populations." He has written: "I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the landscape, especially those places where the land reveals itself as being both an agent of change and the field of human endeavour." Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa has written of Ruwedel that "On the one hand, [he works] in series, which are repetitive, categorical and often open-ended engagements. On the other, [he works] from premises that can be enumerated by arbitrary data, like the number of palms in the titles of desert sites in California…" Ruwedel predominantly uses a Linhof 4×5 large format view camera, which records a lot of detail. Captions are an intrinsic element of his pictures. He is influenced by the New Topographics photographers ("survey of natural beauty permanently altered by human industry"), particularly Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams; also by Walker Evans, Robert Smithson and 19th-century American and European expeditionary photography. Columbia River: the Hanford Stretch, published in 1993, is a series of black and white landscape photographs at the Hanford Site, a nuclear complex on the Columbia River whose reactors made plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Italian Navigator, published in 2001, is a series of black and white photographs of the sites of Cold War era nuclear weapons testing in the USA. From 1999 to the present, Ruwedel has documented the work of contemporary artists who have made land art. He has also photographed evidence of human activity in the landscape that are thousands of years old. Crossing is a series of colour photographs that show traces of illegal immigration as evidenced by litter and other artefacts left near the Mexico–United States border. Westward the Course of Empire, published in 2008, is a series of black and white landscape photographs for which Ruwedel "walked and photographed along more than 130 abandoned railway lines that had once crossed hundreds of miles of desert and tunnelled through mountain ranges" in the western United States and Canada. It was made between 1994 and 2006. "The pictures followed the skeleton tracks across plains, through cuts blasted in the rock, into derelict tunnels and over the remains of wooden trestles that carried the rails across rivers and creeks." One Thousand Two Hundred Twelve Palms, published in 2010, is a series of photographs of all the places in the deserts of California named for a number of palms. It was made over about one year and the total number of palms mentioned adds up to 1212. Message from the Exterior, published in 2015, is a series of black and white "portraits" of abandoned and decaying houses in desert communities around the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Made over the same ten-year period, Dog Houses, published in 2017, is a series of color photographs of doghouses found in those desert regions. Pictures of Hell is a series of black and white photographs of places in Canada and the US, each with a name that includes mention of Hell or the Devil. It was made over twenty years and published in 2014. Ruwedel's first work made outside North America is Ouarzazate, photographs of movie sets in Ouarzazate in the Moroccan desert, made in 2014 and 2016 and published in 2018.

Ruwedel was associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal for sixteen years from 1984 to 2001. He has been professor of art at California State University, Long Beach since 2002. He has also taught at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Ruwedel's work is held in the following public collections: • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA: 38 prints (as of February 2019) • Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY: 9 prints (as of February 2019) • Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec • Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL: 5 prints (as of February 2019) • National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: 28 prints (as of February 2019) • National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario: 148 works (as of February 2019) • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: 32 prints (as of February 2019) • Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia

• 2014: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation • 2014: Scotiabank Photography Award, Canada • 2018: Shortlisted, Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2019 for his exhibition, The Artist and Society, at Tate Modern