Rob Ball‘s Silent Coast, published by Photo Editions (2022), suggests a distorted type of lyrical documentary investigation where the cruel conditions of political complications atomize the social concerns of a place and its people, reducing the everyday plight of the individual as small, unheard, and unnecessary. An opaque and uneasy accent of dissolve […]
Though change is metered through the concept of progress in urban space, oftentimes there is an arrestation of form as its transitions from one set of facades to its new progressive and updated counterpart. This arrestation sees the hybridity of new and old caught in a transitional moment in which both are vying for […]
“In avoiding the self-imposed restrictions of the Bechers and their countless imitators, López Luz spares us from the tediousness of some of those series, dissecting singular aspects of the urban environment with great insight.”
“Every image poses the question of American identity not just from the standpoint of our present reality, but from the playbook of iconic images – most of them from the twentieth century – that make up the history of American photography.”
“Maybe just to plant a stake in the ground, I’d also say that topics are not necessary. Which doesn’t at all mean that one can’t have one; just that one needn’t”. This conversation took place over a year of emailing and should be read as informal. The intention was to talk about Tim’s […]
“However hard I tried to ‘illustrate’ an aspect of the urban environment, to unmask and present how this sleepy, suburban environment ‘functioned’ and fitted together somehow it always failed”.
“In Vancouver, there is no image of nature that is not at the same time an image of private property.”
“A good number of the images allegedly had annotations written on the images such as “not interested in pictures”, “Deceased”, and “Looks better from the ground” written on them”
“My work in the landscape is ultimately about human culture, not about nature. I always think of landscape as historical, or historicized; as not existing outside of history.”
Each image still serves as a living testament of sorts, but as winter approaches, I fear they will begin to form colonies of graves, for which, I have no answers.
Mark Ruwedel is an artist who has been photographing American deserts and other remote locations for over 25 years. With an affinity for stark, barren landscapes that are otherwise uninhabited, Ruwedel found the desert and it soon became his primary field of inquiry. Influenced by photographers Lewis Baltz, Walker Evans and Robert Adams, Ruwedel’s […]
“I never had any profound loyalty to the idea of photography as a medium but simply as the most efficient way of making or recording an image.”