Inta Ruka

Inta Ruka is a Latvian photographer, born in 1958. She is one of the most well-known, contemporary artists of the Baltic states. She received a scholarship of the Hasselblad Foundation in 1998, the “Spidola Award“ of the Latvian Culture Foundation in 1999 and a scholarship of the Villa Waldberta in Feldafing in 2002. One year later the Artist‘s Union of Latvia awarded her the „Price of the Year 2003“. Inta Ruka's photographs has already been presented in several important international exhibitions. In 1999 Ruka took part at the 48th Biennale of Venice that finally publicised her name far beyond the frontiers of Latvia. In 2006 the Photography Centre in Istanbul organised a large solo-show of her photos. Until January 2007 her photographs were shown together with works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Boris Mikhailov and other famous artists in the exhibition “In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century” at the Barbican Arts Centre in London.

Since more than two decades Inta Ruka is photographing the people of her country – from 1984 to 2000 primarily in the rural area of Balvi (“My Country People“) and later on increasingly in the Latvian capital Riga. In the series “People I happened to meet“ she strikes up conversations with unknown people in order to ask them for a portrait. By contrast in “Amalias Street 5” she is focussing on the inhabitants of a certain ensemble of apartments in Riga. Off the beaten track of the picturesque Old Town with the entire restored tourist features she provides an undisguised view on the current state of flux in Latvia since its integration into the EU. In the former countries of the eastern block she shares her documentary-anthropological approach with Anatanas Sutkus and Boris Mikhailov and international with her American colleagues Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.