Background
Ruwedel was born on June 11, 1954 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States.
Kutztown, Pennsylvania, United States
Ruwedel received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 1978.
1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Ruwedel earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in 1983.
(Photographed over a ten-year period, Dog Houses is a coll...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Ruwedel-Dog-Houses/dp/0985995890/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Ruwedel was born on June 11, 1954 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States.
Ruwedel received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kutztown State College (nowadays Kutztown University of Pennsylvania) in 1978. Five years later he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University.
Ruwedel began his career as a custom printer at V.I.P. Color in Bethlehem in 1979 and had held the position for a year. In 1983, he took a position of a documentary photographer at King County Office of Historic Preservation. Then in 1984, Mark was appointed an associate professor at Concordia University, where he worked until 2001. Since 2002, he has been a professor of art at California State University.
In addition to his teaching career, Ruwedel has participated in individual and group exhibitions since 1982. He made a series "Columbia River: the Hanford Stretch", which includes black and white landscape photographs at the Hanford Site. In his "Westward the Course of Empire" series (1994-2007), he traces abandoned railway lines, which appear as meandering dirt trails or wooden trestles overrun by vegetation.
Mark's series "Westward the Course of Empire" was made between 1994 and 2006. During that time 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. His series "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.
His series "Message from the Exterior" published in 2015, includes black and white photos of abandoned and decaying houses in desert communities around the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Also Ruwedel photographed, over a ten-year period, doghouses found in those desert regions and his series "Dog Houses" was published in 2017.
In addition, he made over twenty years the series of black and white photographs of places in Canada and the United States "Pictures of Hell", which was 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. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Presentation House Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery and many others.
(Photographed over a ten-year period, Dog Houses is a coll...)
2017Tonopah and Tidewater
2002Deep Creek
1999Central Pacific
1994Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific
2004Great Northern
2005Devils Gate
2012Kettle Valley
1999Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation
2004San Diego and Arizona Eastern
2003Antelope Valley
2003Rancho Seco
2006Canadian Pacific
2000Columbia and Western
1999Antelope Valley
2007Crossing
2005Crossing
2005Coachella Valley
2004Camas Prairie
2006Columbia and Western
1999Opportunities Realized
2014Spokane Portland and Seattle
1998LA River/Glendale Narrows
2016Arroyo Seco
2016Hell Gate
2000Dusk
2010Ruwedel is influenced by the New Topographics photographers, particularly Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams and also by Walker Evans, Robert Smithson and 19th-century American and European expeditionary photography.
Ruwedel primarily uses a Linhof 4×5 large format view camera, which records a lot of detail.
He uses land as a suitable place for social inquisition by studying each intricate history of the American or Canadian West and producing mesmerizing black-and-white photographs of the grades, cuts, tunnels, trestles, and craters of his immediate surroundings to reveal narratives-both geological and human-contained within.