Mark Ruwedel’s Los Angeles River begins at Big Tujunga Wash and ends at the Pacific, and the waterway he records is neither scenic nor pristine. Its wildness has been designed, contested, permitted and resisted, and the photographs hold that condition steady rather than resolving it.

The method is deliberate and slow. Working in black and white with large- and medium-format cameras, Ruwedel photographs the way a surveyor might, accumulating evidence across terrain that has been further laid bare by wildfire. The lineage he enters is explicit — the nineteenth-century photographer-cartographers Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, the land artists and New Topographics photographers of the 1970s — yet these pictures are not homages. They set their own terms for looking at a landscape that is at once ordinary and strange.

Rivers Run Through It is the first of four volumes in a series titled Landscapes of Four Ecologies, a nod to Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and to its description of the city as an ecological wonder. Ruwedel has spent a decade on the project and calls it his most ambitious to date; his own definition of “epic” is telling — a project too large, with porous boundaries, almost out of control.

That ambition is the reason to pay attention. A first volume in a four-part sequence, published by MACK in a debossed printed hardcover of 136 pages, reads as an opening statement: an artist committing himself publicly to an extended argument about one city’s ecology and asking readers to follow it to the end. The book’s value for a collection lies in the coherence of that commitment rather than in any claim of scarcity.