Written on the Land

Afterimage, May-June, 2003 by Bruno Chalifour

Written on the Land

by Mark Ruwedel

Presentation House Gallery, 2002/64pp (sb).

To my knowledge, Written on the Land is the second monograph dedicated to Mark Ruwedel's work. Ruwedel's photography has the same approach to the North American landscape, the way we inherited it at the end of the twentieth century, as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Robert Dawson and Stephen Johnson (The Great Central Valley, 1993), Terry Evans (Disarming the Prairie, 1998), Peter Goin (Nuclear Landscapes, 1993), David Hanson (Wasteland, 1997), or Richard Misrach and his Desert Cantos series. It does not pretend to be anything else.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ruwedel's images deal with the "new topography" of the American west after it has been traveled, named, worked, transformed and contaminated by "the white man" (for lack of a better word.) His first monograph, The Hanford Stretch, sponsored by Concordia University (Montreal), showed the green and pleasant landscape unrolling along the banks of the Columbia River, at a location selected in 1943 by the Manhattan Project to built 9 nuclear reactors. Eight out of these reactors were directly cooled by the water of the Columbia river flowing through the radio-active cores before being returned to the river contaminating water, land, and all living species downstream, including the human one, native or not.

Ruwedel is a very quiet man who makes very quiet black and white landscape photographs with a large format camera. Written on the Land is the catalog of an exhibition that will tour Canada until December 2004. The book/catalog is organized around three themes: "The Ice Age" showing ancient paths and ceremonial grounds in an arid landscape, "Pictures of Hell" humorously lingering on the naming of places in the west, and "Westward, the Course of the Empire" dealing with the signs left on the landscape by what once was a railroad track. Three essays, "Symptomology in the Desert" by Bill Jeffries, the director of the Presentatio House Gallery, "About the Surface of the Earth: A Photographic Narrative" by Ann Thomas of the National Gallery of Canada, and "The Stone Horse" by Barry Lopez, accompany the images.

The high quality of the reproductions in the book conveys the meditative atmosphere of the photographer's work. The thirty six plates exhibit how the desert has recorded the passage of Man since the dawn of humanity. The presentation of these desolate landscapes is structured in a circular manner, starting with the desert as a test site for new technologies (Panamint Valley. Lake Hill, an Island in the Ancient Lake. Experimental Aircraft Area) and ending with a view of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty submerged. This catalog and show will please the lovers of craftsmanship in black and white photography as well as the followers of a long tradition of American landscapists.