Yago Ruiz (Spain, 1985) is an award winning photographer based in London.
After a life-changing visit to India and Nepal in 2008, Yago Ruiz decided to use Photography as a powerful means of expression of the culture and people he encounters in his diverse trips. He has visited more than 30 countries so far and lived between Ethiopia and United Kingdom since 2013, and continues trying to capture the dailylife of being humans. Always in the context of travelling, Reportage, Portrait and Street photography are his most representative styles.
For the London Photo Show 2024, Yago Ruiz is showing for the first time in an exhibition his two long term ongoing projects in the city of London:
“Mattie & Walker: A Clowning Story” ****
Clowning is a profession in clear decadence and destined to a quick extinction, at least in the way it has been understood for the last 250 years. The concept has changed substantially, especially as a result of movies and TV series that in recent times have turned the figure of the clown into something terrifying. Being a clown today is, therefore, an almost heroic act to which few want to submit.
It is, at the end of the day, a pure vocation.
“Mattie & Walker” is a photo project that delves into the border between the person and the character, as well as the way in which clowns enface and assume their coming out of the stages and their subsequent retirement, but who at the slightest opportunity return to wear their “second skin”, for pure enjoyment and love for the art.
“Mattie & Walker” aims to give visibility to this marginal sector of society, where a clown is expected to be young and energetic, but which is populated mostly by men and women who live the last years of their lives often in solitude and sometimes without the support given to common professions.
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“Hasidim, the unseen” ****
Stamford Hill (London) is home to the largest community of Hasidic Jews of Ashkenazi descents in Europe. Approximately 40,000 people. In this London neighbourhood live their daily lives four of the main sects of the dozens that exist: Bobov (originally from Poland, but with its main headquarters in Brooklyn, USA), Belz (Ukraine), Biala (Poland) and Satmar (Hungary)
“Hasidim, the unseen” is an ongoing project started three years ago about searching and learning from this hermetic and seemingly hostile community, but once it opens its doors to the outsider it is surprising and unexpected.
With special feasts and celebrations almost monthly, its life is shaped by the Torah and all the surrounding rules added over the centuries by the different sects. Everything that is done or not done is asked to the Rabbi, who, depending on the sect, will make some decisions or others. The Sabbath is the key moment of the week, everything turns around the Sabbath: clothing, liturgies or allowed and forbidden activities.
The surprising about these communities is, despite appearances, how they enjoy their lives in ways that are sometimes shocking to the outsider. Electronic music, energetic dancing and a rich and abundant social life. The traditional and conservative is sometimes overtaken by a bit of debauchery (permitted, of course) and open and interesting conversations.
Stamford Hill is a neighbourhood full of contrasts, and there are, as everywhere, rich and poor, powerful people and simple folk and countless layers and points of view.
The aim of this project is to visit all these layers and break the Western-derived cliché of a backward, heteropatriarchal cultural group, and to delve where no one else has done so by finding the real face of Hasidic Jews.
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https://www.yagoruizphotography.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yagoruizphoto/
