David Ruderman

Artist Statement

David Ruderman is a photographer who lives in the Sacramento area. Born in Kendallville, a small town in northeastern Indiana, David moved to California in 1975 for an internship and residency in anesthesiology at Stanford University. Practicing at Mercy Hospital of Sacramento for 39 years, he is now partially retired and has more time for his passion--photography.

His first camera was an Asahi Pentax 35mm that he took with him for a two year Peace Corps assignment in northern India from 1969-1971. Before that he was a chemist at Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan. Medical school in Ann Arbor, Michigan left no time for photography. It was not until 1975 that he purchased a very heavily used Pentax 67 mid-size film camera. Once he arrived in Sacramento he built a small permanent darkroom for black and white photography.

He held out from doing digital photography until the camera resolution finally exceeded a megapixel. The Nikon 900 1.3 megapixel camera met that requirement. Digital photography has its own learning curve, but having had wet darkroom experience has been an advantage.

His work is included in the collections of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in Saint Joseph, Missouri. His black and white images have been published in Black & White photography magazine and LensWork magazine.

He loves sharing his photographic life with his wife Victoria who has become an outstanding artist in her own right.