Seven buildings across Los Angeles, each at some point an art studio for Ed Ruscha, form the subject of Mark Ruwedel’s Studio E.R. The photographs were made in the city where Ruwedel lives and works, and where Ruscha’s career took shape. No interiors, no tools, no trace of the hand at work: the camera attends to the structures themselves, ordinary architecture that has been used for art and then left to the ordinary pressures of change and forgetting. A studio is both a room and a premise about how art gets made. Ruwedel photographs the premise, not the myth.
The project extends Ruwedel’s long engagement with the North American landscape, a practice he has sustained for more than three decades by returning to the same places and subjects over extended periods. He has spoken of the land as a vast historical archive, and of his work as an inquiry into how social, technological, and cultural forces meet the natural world. Studio E.R. narrows that archive to a biographical scale without settling into conventional portraiture. The seven duotone plates carry the weight of evidence rather than homage, and the sequence holds to a restraint that lets absence do its work.
Issued as part of Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, the volume is a compact hardcover of sixteen pages, with seven duotone plates and one original signed photograph. The format is not incidental: its compression sharpens the project’s interest in what remains when a working life has moved through a set of rooms. This is Ruwedel’s first artist’s book with the publisher.
For a collector, the attraction lies in the precise overlap of subject, method, and form. Ruwedel is a photographer whose work is held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the National Gallery of Canada, among others. Here he draws a quiet line between his own landscape practice and Ruscha’s Los Angeles, treating neither as monument. The signed print places the book in Ruwedel’s hand, while the edition of 500 numbered copies fixes its place within a defined series.
