ABOUT MALCOLM RYDER

BIOGRAPHY

A Virginia native, I came to Oakland, CA, by way of Norfolk, Atlanta, New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco. I was born into a family of activist artists and university professors. After becoming one of the first Black graduates of the elite Westminster Schools in Atlanta, I pioneered and completed a new degree of my own design in Visual Arts at Princeton, becoming one of its first photography graduates.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, I exhibited as a member of the City Without Walls artists' collective in Newark. Later I developed and ran the jurying system used for making grants directly to visual artists by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, and the NY Foundation for the Arts. In the SF/East Bay Area I joined boards for the Julia Morgan Arts Center and 2AES/CCA, the Center for Critical Architecture. Currently I run Ryder Foto and am on the Board of Directors for Oakland Art Murmur and the East Bay Photo Collective.

PRACTICE

See my recent exhibition history (2024-present) here.

I had first photographed extensively in the performing arts and sports, while also doing work for designers, documentarians, and marketers. I left this conventional professional activity however, to do tech and strategy consulting, augmented by advisory or board positions with arts organizations, for over 25 years. But in 2016 I resumed steady practice as a photographer, intrigued by my local environment, Oakland, CA.

When not photographing, I work with other artists primarily in a curatorial or editorial mode, or in collaborative projects fusing camerawork with other vehicles ranging from digital magazines, books, or galleries, to multimedia performances.

My current audience and co-creators include historians, journalists, other visual artists and curators, and the communities of the landscapes seen in my photographs.

STATEMENT

I am currently Creative Director of West Oakland Matters, an artists’ collaborative focused on the legacy and culture of the former Harlem of the West. I explore the environment with a documentary style that zeroes in on how people have created their own surroundings. This generates unusual or ephemeral scenes that announce a presence of people that is most often hidden in plain sight – unobserved, or even avoided, and frequently obliterated by physical change over time.

My approach to creating the scenes fuses that documentary with invention. I regard my practice as making landscape as portraiture. My camerawork and composition intend to distill locations into a display featuring the inhabitant’s own vernacular creativity as the public presence of their self-identity. The results can range easily from the historical to the emotional to the political. The images range from wider distance shots leaning towards iconography, to tighter close shots celebrating the colloquial.

As street photography, this aggressive departure from capturing the theater of actual people in space embraces the makers of the seen space as artists – which I parallel, through analogy, by shaping my unique views from what they have made.