Inta Ruka

Inta Ruka (born 1958) is a Latvian photographer.^[1]

Ruka received a scholarship from the Hasselblad Foundation in 1998, the Spidola Award of the Latvian Culture Foundation in 1999 and a scholarship from the Villa Waldberta in Feldafing in 2002. One year later, the Artist's Union of Latvia awarded her the "Prize of the Year 2003."

Inta Ruka's photographs have already been presented in several important international exhibitions. In 1999, she took part at the 48th Biennale of Venice which finally publicised her name internationally. In 2006, the Photography Centre in Istanbul organised a large solo show of her photos. Until January 2007, her photographs were shown with works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Boris Mikhailov and others in the exhibition "In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century" at the Barbican Arts Centre in London.

For more than two decades, Inta Ruka has photographed the people of Latvia – from 1984 to 2000, primarily in the rural area of Balvi ("My Country People") and, later on, increasingly in the capital of 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 focusing on the inhabitants of a certain ensemble of apartments in Riga. Off the beaten track of the picturesque Old Town, with its extensive restoration, she provides an undisguised view on the current state of flux in Latvia since its integration into the European Union.

Among the former Soviet bloc countries, Ruka shares her documentary-anthropological approach with Antanas Sutkus and Boris Mikhailov; internationally with those of the Americans Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

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