The houses Mark Ruwedel photographs east of Los Angeles were never built to last. In *Message from the Exterior* they appear as abandoned dwellings — small, often eccentric huts, at once humorous and a little forlorn — left behind by people who tried to live where the desert offers little encouragement. Ruwedel does not treat them as curiosities. He reads them as a particular and poignant form of vernacular architecture, and as traces of lives that remain anonymous.

The book is constructed in two movements. “Desert Houses” inventories 68 of these structures, a catalogue assembled with the patience of someone who has looked at the same terrain long enough to notice what others pass by. “Dusk” returns to houses after the sun has gone, so that they appear in subdued, dusky tones in which presence and absence seem to occupy the same frame, and isolation acquires a palpable weight. The pairing is the argument: an daylight survey, then its aftermath.

Underneath both sections lies a larger proposition. Ruwedel treats the desert as a palimpsest of cultural and natural histories, and his inventory becomes a way of reading that layering — each structure a possible clue to the impulse to make a home in the wilderness, however transitory the result. The accumulation is not nostalgic. It is closer to evidence, assembled without sentiment and without condescension toward the people who built these places.

MACK published the book in September 2016: 128 pages, 77 colour plates, a debossed hardback with a tipped-in image, 24 x 29 cm. Ruwedel, born in 1954 and based in California, has exhibited and published internationally for more than thirty years; his work is held by Tate Modern, the J. Paul Getty Museum, LACMA, The Met, SF MoMA, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Earlier books include *Westward the Course of Empire* and *1212 Palms* (both Yale University Art Gallery) and *Pictures of Hell*. In 2014 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award.

For a collector, the interest here is structural as much as photographic. Ruwedel has spent his career examining how the American West records its own passage, and this book sets a daylight taxonomy against a dusk meditation on what remains when the light goes. The two halves need each other, and the sequence makes the case more convincingly than either section could alone.