Mark Ruwedel has won the fourth annual Scotiabank Photography Award, announced this evening at a ceremony held at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto.
Ruwedel receives a $50,000 cash prize as well as a solo exhibition at the 2015 Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival and the assurance that a book of his work will be published and internationally distributed by Steidl.
With the win, Ruwedel edged out two other strong contenders for the award—Vancouver’s Rodney Graham, who represented Canada at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and Toronto’s Donald Weber, who has received two World Press Photo Awards.
Ruwedel—a Pennsylvania-born artist who studied photography at Montreal’s Concordia University, and later taught there—is known for images of landscapes and architecture that have lately focused upon deserts and desert structures. His work was included in the 2012 Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada, and earlier this month he won a Guggenheim Fellowship.
“He is a master of seeing and printing and has inspired countless landscape photographers,” award co-founder Edward Burtynsky said in a release. “Mark’s eye for detail and his subtle perceptions about the intersection of—and commentary upon—the historic versus contemporary in landscape photography remains matchless.”
Three large-scale projects which occupied him for more than a decade: The Ice Age, which considers the traces of material culture in the context of geological time; Pictures of Hell, an inventory of places named for Hell or the Devil, and Westward the Course of Empire, a study of the land forms created by railroad building in the American and Canadian West.
Ruwedel’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern and National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions. A book of his Pictures of Hell project will be published in Fall 2014.
Currently, Ruwedel splits his time between California and coastal BC.
The award decision was made by NSCAD professor Robert Bean, Canadian Cultural Centre deputy director Catherine Bédard, and National Gallery of Canada photography curator Ann Thomas.
Past winners for the award include Stan Douglas, Arnaud Maggs and Lynne Cohen.