08/05/2026
Meet Our Photographers: Mark Ludak: Among the many types and mediums of photography we exhibit is ‘concerned photography’; photography that tackles an important subject. One of the shows we have up this month through August 9, the work of Mark Ludak, is just such an exhibition. Here he answers our questions...
🔵Soho Photo Gallery: What would you like people to know about you or your work?
🔴Mark Ludak: In Plain Sight looks at the incarceration and detention camps for Japanese, German and Italian citizens and non-citizens of the United States during World War ll. These photographs start with what is left on these sites of incarceration. Foundation slabs scarring the soil. Fence posts demarcating buildings no longer in existence. Contemporary shipping containers set in an Eastern Sierra landscape for no apparent reason. A dumping ground for non-working appliances. Flat, open ground where a firehouse, a hospital, a boiler house once served a purpose in daily life. Some of these places have returned to something resembling an ordinary yet sublime landscape: a field of sage and sweetgrass, a river snaking through an arid landscape, a view of the high desert with an reminder of another era.
🔵SPG: What or who has been your biggest inspiration?
🔴ML: There are so many photographers, painters and thinkers. The work of Walker Evans, Roy DeCarava, Ray Metzger, Aaron Siskind, Helen Levitt, Mark Feldstein, Harry Callahan, Richard Misrach, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Agnes Martin, Mark Rotko, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Viktor Frankl, Guy Oakes, Maurice Natanson, The Photo League.
🔵SPG: What is the process/technique you used for this body of work?
🔴ML: Medium format digital capture and inkjet prints sized at 20 x 27 inches.
Mark’s website: www.markludak.com
🎯Soho Photo Gallery, 539 West 23rd Street in Chelsea, is open Wednesday though Sunday, 12noon - 6pm.