Mark Ruwedel

Although known primarily as a Western landscape photographer, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has acknowledged that he fits somewhere “in between” a host of sometimes competing, sometimes complementary inspirations. Ruwedel has cited a highly varied range of artistic influences: 19th-century photographers such as Carleton Watkins; 1970s New Topographics photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams; Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer; and even the Surrealists Man Ray and André Breton.
Ruwedel's one-of-a-kind handmade and limited-edition artist's books—most from the Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections—are thought-provoking and often humorous visual essays on his inspirations and influences. Shown together for the very first time in this exhibition catalog, these artist's books, albums and portfolios provide multiple opportunities to investigate diverse aspects of 19th, 20th and 21st-century art and photographic practices.

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.