Mark Ruwedel
1954–
Introduction
Mark Ruwedel (born June 11, 1954) is an American landscape photographer and educator.
His books include Westward the Course of Empire, depicting the remains of abandoned railway lines in the landscape of the western United States and Canada; and Message from the Exterior, abandoned and decaying houses in desert communities around Los Angeles.
Ruwedel was associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal from 1984 to 2001 and has been Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach since 2002. He is based in both California and coastal British Columbia.
In 2014, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Presentation House Gallery and Southern Alberta Art Gallery. His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Wikidata identifier
Q61746879
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed October 21, 2025.
Introduction
Ruwedel worked as a custom printer in a photography lab in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from 1979 to 1980. In 1980-1981, Ruwedel moved to Montréal, Québec, Canada, to pursue his Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University. He has been an instructor of photography at Concordia since 1982. He has also worked as a documentary photographer for the King County Office of Historic Preservation in Seattle, Washington, from 1983 to 1984, and again in 1986.
Roles
Artist, photographer, printer, teacher
ULAN identifier
500037077
Names
Mark Ruwedel, Mark Ruwadel
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed October 21, 2025.