Ouarzazate is a small city in the Moroccan desert, known less for its own architecture than for the film industry that grew up around it, beginning with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Invited by the American Friends of the Marrakech Museum for Photography and the Visual Arts to propose a project during a residency there, Mark Ruwedel photographed its movie sets in 2014 and 2016.

The material he worked with is unusually literal and unusually slippery. Much of the filming in Ouarzazate has been for costume and Biblical epics — Cleopatra, The Garden of Eden, The Mummy, The Last Temptation of Christ — as well as for The Sheltering Sky and The Hills Have Eyes. Some sets sit abandoned; others are continually repurposed. An Egyptian portal opens onto a medieval village. A Kasbah that reads as an authentic ruin is in fact a ruined replica of a “real” Kasbah built elsewhere. Shepherds drive their flocks past “ancient” siege engines and Roman columns.

The book extends a preoccupation that has shaped Ruwedel’s work for three decades — contemporary ruins, and the histories of landscape and of landscape photography — though it was made far from the American deserts where much of that work was produced. Ruwedel has said the scenes reminded him of passages in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, and the photographs carry an uncanny resemblance to nineteenth-century European photography of ancient Egypt and the Middle East. The confusion of original and copy is not an incidental joke here; it is the subject.

MACK published Ouarzazate in 2018 as a 136-page hardback. For a collector, its interest lies in that convergence: a photographer whose central subject has been the ruin as a fact of the American landscape turning to a place where the ruin is manufactured, and where the conventions of an older photographic tradition are both quoted and undermined. The sequence is compact and deliberate, and the book belongs alongside the earlier desert work rather than in its shadow.