About

A seamstress who photographed her neighbours

Inta Ruka was born in Riga in 1958 and trained as a seamstress. She learned photography at the V.E.E. studio under Gunārs Birkmanis, joined the Riga photographers’ group “A” in 1985, and for years supported herself cleaning offices while building one of the most quietly ambitious bodies of portrait work in northern Europe.

Her method has not changed in forty years. A medium-format camera on a tripod, daylight, a conversation first and the photograph afterwards — and always the person’s name, written down. She returns to the same villages and the same staircases for decades, so that the work becomes a record not of a moment but of a life.

“Each person has a meaning and a purpose in society,” she has said — which is why she photographs one person at a time, and never crowds.