Mark Ruwedel: Dog Houses

Photographed over a 10-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 the expanding railroad lines across the 19th-century American West, turns his discerning eye to the last western frontierthe American desert. Dog Houses, part of Ruwedels larger Desert House series, published by MACK (2016), takes us to a place where the 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 the human houses, the funny and sometimes haunting structures evoke the asymmetrical yet reciprocal relationship between owner and animal. Ruwedel is represented in museums worldwide: Tate Modern, J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) and National Gallery of Canada, among others.