Pictures of Hell by Mark Ruwedel presents photographs from his decades-long survey of western landscapes named for Hell or the Devil. In the 19th century, Euro-American explorers of the American and Canadian West typically described the landscape as a desolate waste. Clarence King, writing for Overland Monthly in 1870, described the area surrounding Shoshone Falls in present-day Idaho as an “abyss” of “blackened ruins,” “a frightful glimpse of the Inferno”. King, on orders to survey the 40th parallel, produced a report for congress in 1868 illustrated with photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan. So began a history of exploring, naming, and documenting the western American landscape that implied it was a place yet to be tamed by culture, industry, and Christianity.
The series depicts many different places that share the same name, including 27 different Devils Gates and 8 Hells Gates, 12 Devils Canyons, and several Devils Gardens, Devils Punchbowls, and Hells Half Acres. Other names appear to be unique: Devils Golf Course, Devils Ball Diamond, Dirty Devil River, Devils Homestead, and Bumpass Hell. One California gold rush camp was known as Hell-Out-For-Noon City and another, Helltown, is not far from the town of Paradise. A spot in the California Desert is named, simply, Hell.
The sheer number of nooks, crags and untamed lands nominated by these infernal references is evocative and in its totality, Pictures of Hell creates an inventory of the landforms of the mostly arid West. In each image, Ruwedel responds to the provocation of the place name with formal subtlety, precision and restraint. With both humor and a conceptual rigor, his project considers the politics of place naming, the history of western expansionism, and the asymmetry that often occurs between the name and the site, or the map and the territory.
Ruwedel is inspired by the 19th-century photographers whose photo albums revealed the glories of the American West. He differs from his predecessors, however, in that his view of the landscape is not uncritical. Instead, he layers history with a contemporary investigation of technology, anthropology and colonization.
Mark Ruwedel, Hell and Home
May 4 to June 24, 2017
Yossi Milo Gallery
245 10th Ave
New York, NY 10001
USA
