My Country People

The village where her family comes from, photographed over eighteen years — the same households, ageing.

Ruka began photographing in the Balvi region, in the north-east of Latvia, where her family comes from. She returned for eighteen years, to the same farmyards and the same kitchens, so that the series records not an encounter but the slow arithmetic of a life: children who grow, houses that empty, a cardigan kept for good occasions and worn in three photographs a decade apart.