Barbara Ruth
"Lisa in Campbell," photograph, 2016
[Image Description: A light-skinned woman with curly auburn hair wearing a red short sleeve shirt and jeans is walking away from the camera. She is using Canadian crutches and has a bag over her right shoulder, resting on her left hip. She walks in a courtyard with pavers, and the photograph has been manipulated so the shadows of her legs and crutches are wavy, making patterns with the pavers. Vegetation is on both sides of her; she walks toward an area of increasing light and plants.]
Artist's Statement
This photograph was taken with a Samsung Note 2 cellphone and manipulated with filters both on the phone and online. I began taking photos in 2013. Doing so has made me more visually aware of my surroundings, more present to the beauty of this world. Editing a photograph has much in common with editing writing, through cutting (cropping) and enhancing. I often find something in a photo which wasn’t what I was going for, some little section which is interesting when enlarged and altered. This is a picture of my beloved, Lisa. I like how the shadows of her legs and her crutches come out toward the viewer.
Artist Photograph
[Image description: Close-up showing part of the face of an olive-skinned woman with dark brown eyes. Parts of her gray and brown eyebrows are visible. She is looking down and has a slight smile and a fairly prominent brown mole under her left eye.] Photo Credit: Barbara Ruth.
Artist Biography
Barbara Ruth is drawn to the edges, the in-between, the transitional lenses of her glasses, the equinoxes, the mixing of watercolors on the thirsty paper, the going up and coming down, the phases of moon and tide, not this/not that. She is a physically disabled neurodivergent photographer, poet, fiction writer, essayist, and memoiristwhose work has been published in Australia, Canada, India, UK and US, and widely anthologized in disability, feminist, literary and queer anthologies, including QDA: Queer Disability Anthology, The Spoon Knife Anthology, and Barking Sycamores: Year One. She lives in San Jose, CA, USA.