Search results for ""Author Mark Ruwedel""

For the past decade, photographer Mark Ruwedel has been compiling an epic photographic account of the natural environment of his home city of Los Angeles. From the stark Californian coast to the vast ex-panses of the interior – many of which have been further lain bare by wildfires – Ruwedel tracks a unique ecology in constant, if subtle, dialogue with the human life that surrounds it: one where wildness is designed, contested, permitted, or resisted to varying degrees of success. In this first of four volumes, Ruwedel follows the Los Angeles River from its source in Big Tujunga Wash to the Pacific Ocean. Using patient, forensic large- and medium-format photography in black and white, Ruwedel recalls the legacy of nineteenth-century photographer-cartographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, as well as land artists and New Topographics photo-graphers of the 1970s, while forging his own elucidating relationship with the landscape. The title Landscapes of Four Ecolgies recalls architectural critic Reyner Baynam classic study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, which describes the city as ‘one of the ecological wonders of the modern world’. The scale of this four-part project, Ruwedel’s most ambitious to date, is an artistic statement in itself: ‘When I say epic,’ he explains, ‘I am thinking of a project that is too large, which has porous boundaries, which is almost out of control.’

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Ouarzazate is a small city in the Moroccan desert famous for its movie studios and filming locations, an industry which began with David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia. Invited by the American Friends of the Marrakech Museum for Photography and the Visual Arts to propose a project for his artist residency there, Ruwedel photographed the movie sets in 2014 and 2016. Much of the filming activity in Ouarzazate has been for costume and Biblical epics. Cleopatra, The Garden of Eden, The Mummy, The Last Temptation of Christ; but also The Sheltering Sky and The Hills Have Eyes. Many of the sets appear to have been abandoned while others are constantly repurposed. An Egyptian portal leads to a medieval village. An authentic Kasbah in ruins is actually a ruined replica of a “real” Kasbah elsewhere. Shepherds drive their flocks past “ancient” siege machines and Roman columns. “I was reminded of certain passages in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust.” Far from the American deserts where he has produced much of his work of the past thirty years, in Morocco Ruwedel continues his long term interest in contemporary ruins and the histories of both landscape and landscape photography. The photographs are eerily reminiscent of 19th century European photography of ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

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Photographed over a ten-year period, Dog Houses is a collection of 30 forlorn and often humorous color images of canine shelters found throughout the Southern California desert landscape. American photographer Mark Ruwedel (b. 1954), known for his majestic "Westward" series of residual landforms created by expanding railroad lines across the nineteenth-century American West, turns his discerning eye to the last western frontier—the American desert. Dog Houses, part of Ruwedel's larger "Desert House" series, takes readers to a place where signs of human activity in the landscape are much more recent and revealing. Like their human counterparts, the doghouses in these photographs constitute an inventory of an iconic yet surprisingly flexible form. Often made from discarded material left over from the construction of human houses, the funny and sometimes haunting structures evoke the asymmetrical yet reciprocal relationship between owner and animal.

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