Mark Ruwedel

Moving Rocks #8 (The Racetrack), Mark Ruwedel, 2000

Mark Ruwedel is an artist who has been photographing American deserts and other remote locations for over 25 years, pursuing epic-scaled projects on railroad construction, Pre-Columbian sites, the landscapes of nuclear weapons, and failed attempts to live in the harsh environment of the desert. With an affinity for stark, barren landscapes that are otherwise uninhabited, Ruwedel found solace in the desert as it soon became his primary field of inquiry to explore subtle perceptions about the historical versus contemporary in landscape photography.

Ruwedel’s works do not only overlap the ideas of the landscape and histories the place represents, but also the histories of picture-making. He uses land as a suitable place for social inquisition by studying each detail of the American or Canadian West and producing black and white photographs of the grades, cuts, tunnels, trestles, and craters of his immediate surroundings to reveal narratives within.

My interest in Ruwedel peaked from my knowledge of the great survey photographers of America in the 1800s - his style is reminiscent of the pioneers who mapped a nation through photography. The intriguing dynamic of this work though is the added emphasis on narrative, both geological and human. There is the obvious intention to shoot the environment its natural state but its when you look deeper at the specific parts of the wider picture - or “The Punctum” as Roland Barthes would describe it - that you see the stories this environment has crafted over time. The land is a geological phenomenon that inspires human imagination thanks to it’s natural grandeur and the historical value the intricacies of the setting holds which Ruwedel is able to present beautifully in photographic form.