Mark Ruwedel

Mark Ruwedel (born June 11, 1954) is an American landscape photographer and educator.

His books include Westward the Course of Empire, depicting the remains of abandoned railway lines in the landscape of the western United States and Canada; and Message from the Exterior, abandoned and decaying houses in desert communities around Los Angeles.

Ruwedel was associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal from 1984 to 2001 and has been Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach since 2002. He is based in both California and coastal British Columbia.

In 2014, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Presentation House Gallery and Southern Alberta Art Gallery. His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Life and work Ruwedel was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA.

Photography Ruwedel is a landscape photographer. He photographs the "material residue or evidence of massive invisible forces at work on populations."

Ruwedel predominantly uses a Linhof 4×5 large format view camera, ("survey of natural beauty permanently altered by human industry"),

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. It was made between 1994 and 2006.

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. 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. 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.

Teaching 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. Westward the Course of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. . With an essay by Jock Reynolds. One Thousand Two Hundred Twelve Palms. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2010. . Pictures of Hell. Santa Monica, CA: RAM, 2014. Edited by Simon Baker and Sébastien Montabonel. . With essays by Simon Baker and Chiara Siravo. Edition of 1000 copies. Message from the Exterior. Göttingen: Steidl, 2015. . With an essay by Mark Haworth-Booth. The first part of the book contains photographs from Ruwedel's archive of "Desert Houses," the second part contains the series "Dusk," images of desert houses after sunset. London: Mack, 2016. . Special edition. London: Mack, 2016. Two hardback volumes. Edition of 150 copies. Mark Ruwedel: Scotiabank Photography Award. Göttingen: Steidl, 2015. . Dog Houses. Santa Monica, CA: RAM, 2017. . Ouarzazate. London: Mack, 2018. . Seventy-Two and One Half Miles Across Los Angeles. London: Mack, 2020. .

Handmade artist's books We All Loved Ruscha. Nevada Nevada.

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions Chinati Foundation, Installation for Art and Architecture Symposium, Marfa, TX, 1998 Mark Ruwedel: Written On The Land, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 2002; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 2003 Points of View, Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France, 2011 Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2015. A prize of $50,000.

Awards 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

Collections 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) Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia