Quick Facts
Biography
Ray Mortenson (born 1944) is an American artist photographer who has been documenting the metropolitan corridor of the US' northeastern landscape since the late 1970s.
Mortenson is best known for his black and white photographs of the industrial tidal marshes in the New Jersey Meadowlands and abandoned buildings in The Bronx, taken in the early 1980s. His work is in the permanent collections of a number of important institutions and has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1981.
Work
Mortenson is best known for his black and white photographs of the industrial tidal marshes in the New Jersey Meadowlands and abandoned buildings in The Bronx, taken in the early 1980s. Studying isolated natural areas bordering urban centers, he has documented numerous small lakes and ponds, the Atlantic Ocean, weeds, and extraordinary rocks. Some of his photographs are made in intimate sizes and others as large-scale works.
Mortenson's book Meadowland (1984) was one of the last publications by Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum Press (1970–1984), at that time one of the few independent presses dedicated solely to fine art photography. Lustrum Press published monographs of then-unknown photographers such as Larry Clark, Danny Seymour and Mary Ellen Mark. Historian Gerry Badger called Lustrum “arguably the best of the small American photobook publishers of the 1970s.”
Publication
- Meadowland: Photographs of New Jersey. New York: Lustrum, 1984. ISBN 0-912810-40-8.
Exhibitions
- Broken Glass: Photographs of the South Bronx, Museum of the City of New York, New York, November 2008 – March 2009
- Books in DIY: Photographers & Books, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 2012
- All That Glitters is Not Gold, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, 2014
Collections
Mortenson’s work is held in the following permanent collections:
- Addison Gallery of American Art
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Canadian Centre for Architecture
- Center for Creative Photography, Arizona
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Museum of the City of New York