Malcolm Ryder

As a landscape photographer, I have explored how I can portray my maligned home city of Oakland California, through an original new view. The way I make my pictures pursues an awareness of the cityscape as being an invention and an evolution, a way of seeing how we change our town on our own terms, emboldening us to remake it ourselves as the future that we want.

My work also artistically pursues a fusion of documentary and abstract formalist modes, as an intentional practice of provoking awareness of new ways of seeing the familiar, in what I call "the Eye's Mind". It expresses my advocacy of creating our views of ourselves - as individuals, communities, or cultures - on our own terms rather than having ourselves be defined by others, yet sharing that attitude to ourselves see others more clearly on their terms as well.