Ron Jude

Ron A. Jude (born 1965) is an American photographer and educator, living in Eugene, Oregon. His photography, which "often explores the relationship between people, place, nature and memory", has been published in a number of books. Jude works as a professor of art at the University of Oregon. The Photographers' Gallery in London, and was included in a three-person exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago. His work is held in the collections of the George Eastman Museum; High Museum of Art, MoCP, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2019 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Los Angeles County, California, and raised in rural Idaho. he was living in Upstate New York.

Jude's photographic work "often explores the relationship between people, place, nature and memory."

Alpine Star (2006) contains photographs appropriated from the weekly newspaper in Jude's hometown in Central Idaho.

Other Nature (2008) depicts exterior and interior details of "anonymous motel rooms and the stranger regions of the American landscape". It combines two separate sets of Jude's 4×5 color photographs, made between 2001 and 2008.

Lick Creek Line (2012) follows a fur trapper trekking in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States.

Executive Model (2012) contains photographs of American businessmen in the financial districts of Atlanta, Chicago, New York City and San Francisco between 1992 and 1995. It is "an exploration of the corporate executive as a representative type, as a locus of many of our unspoken assumptions about masculinity, social privilege, race, and power. [. . . ] In the majority of images in Executive Model, the men are seen from the back, their hulking forms filling nearly two-thirds of the frame. In other works, Jude depicts fragmented close-ups of turned heads or gesturing hands."

Lago (2015) was made in the Salton Sea desert in Southern California, "the region Jude was raised in from the mid-1960s."

Vitreous China (2016) contains photographs made in areas of light industry in (primarily) Midwestern American cities, in particular "the ambient peripheral zones suffusing these environments: big rig parking lots, side exits, and other secondary spaces". Jude's grandfather worked as a kiln operator in plants using vitreous china, an enamel coating applied to porcelain. The photographs are interspersed with short texts by Mike Slack.

12Hz (2020) was made in Oregon, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Iceland between 2017 and 2020. Its larger first section mostly depicts tightly cropped views of rocks, ice sheets, volcanoes and raging bodies of water, "with only occasional minor appearances of flora". Lick Creek Line. London: Mack, 2012. . With an essay by Nicholas Muellner. Lago. London: Mack, 2015. . Vitreous China. Stockholm: Libraryman, 2016. . With short texts by Mike Slack. Edition of 400 copies. 12Hz. London: Mack, 2020. . With a text by Paul Kingsnorth.

Publications with contributions by Jude Lost Home. Kamakura, Japan: Super Labo, 2013. . Ten photographers, each of whom contribute a volume, respond to a prose poem by Nobuyuki Ishiki. Eleven volumes in a slipcase. Text in Japanese and English. Edition of 1000 copies.

Awards 1994: Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer's Fellowship, New York 2000 James D. Phelan Award in Photography, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, California 2001: Light Work Grant, Syracuse, New York for the project Landscapes (for Antoine) 2006: Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts 2006–2007 Artist's Grant Lago, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2016 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California: 2 prints (as of December 2020)