The Western Edge

In the second volume of Mark Ruwedel’s epic study of the landscapes of Los Angeles, the artist heads to the coast – the furthest edge of the basin’s sprawl before it meets the Pacific Ocean. These absorbing and layered photographs suggest extremes of many kinds: the far reaches of urbanisation, the dramatic geographies of desert and sea, the boundless ambitions of empire, and the spiralling climate conditions that most recently have seen these areas devastated by fires. Charting a hundred-mile route from Point Mugu, north of Malibu, down to the Bolsa Chica Wetlands of Orange County, Ruwedel studies a range of intricately textured landscapes, woven with the traces of decades of human intervention and the countervailing forces of nature and time. His large-format black-and-white photography recalls iconic photographer-cartographers of the nineteenth century while calling into question the taxonomic certainty and implicit politics of their surveying projects. With this second volume, Ruwedel carries his ambitious project further still towards openness and complexity, capturing the territory with delicacy and precision even as he reveals its elusive scale.