THIS, HERE, LIGHT
there's a world outside the street | i shoot it mostly with a fuji x100 | my name is i.m. ruzz
ASK
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crossfield / alberta
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the only hill in this one hill town
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bird watching
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crossfield gas plant / alberta
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i’ve been contemplating this place i live long hours and it’s given me fits for a year and a half. how to explain it. how to tell the story other than the story of how and why i’m here. it’s boiled down to the enormity of the spaces around me. it’s boiled down to a question of how can it be not enough yet too much at the same time. where long stretches of being entirely unhappy, or underwhelmed by small town life get decimated by wave after wave of incomprehensibly massive storm clouds.
it’s taken 15 or 16 months to start to see some returns on my time here and all this thinking. time to quiet my mind. time to put myself out of the frame for a while. let my own story exhaust itself and make room for something else.
someone told me yesterday i should be ashamed for asking for help from people who follow one of my blogs and i wonder in our hyper social times if the immediacy of things, and the narrow view of most compress our options and don’t allow enough time to let small seeds grow into something more. it takes a ridiculously thick skin to live your life by any different standards than “the norm”. which is to say if money and things don’t mean more to you than time you’re not worth the air you take up and you’re weighed and measured long before could ever explain the nuances of how you make sense of things.
i often feel out of place in large social groups because i can’t use my new watch, or my just in style time perfect pair of shoes to explain that i get it. because the judgements in our modern life come fast and hard. you have to shake them off if you can.
my ego has taken it’s share of lumps in the last two years at the same time as losing faith in my body to perform when i need it to has left me feeling really isolated from the world i photograph most of the time.
i struggle with that mostly because everything in my experience tells me (and i’ve lived many variations of the lives i see through my viewfinder) that i don’t wan’t those lives. i don’t want that furious race to show the world who i am through what i drive, or wear, or who i fuck.
i want to understand things, to see them clearly. to feel them and developing those skills takes large blocks of time, focused energy, and either a love of punishment or a blind commitment to something you can’t quite explain but feel very deeply.
all of which seems to put me at odds more and more each day with the world working around me.
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i may be broke (and mostly broken these days) but occasionally a crow will land on the cast iron fence and i’m deep in untold riches.
your life might not be exactly what you want—or anything like you want—but it’s still on you to mine the treasures from it.
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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” - elliot erwitt
a long long time back, maybe before photography took over my life i remember i happened upon a thought—which, as the young are wont to do—i thought was both true, and original. it turns out it was just true.i’d say to myself not what but how, over and over. everything we do we’ve done a thousand times. everything we see, we’ve almost always seen before. humans are the great adaptors and we quickly consume and catalogue everything we see. the world becomes boring. becomes stale.
i’m fortunate i had that not so original thought because it pushed me through a period in my life where i had no idea how to express something i’ve carried with me all my life. and as i tried on new roles to figure it out I just kept saying not what but how over and over. it was the only persistant thought i had outside of “life is wondrous and the world is a beautiful place”.
then i found photography and found a way to share some of that wonder with you.
when i think about dying the only thing i get scared of is not being able to witness and experience all the beauty. or, dying before i’ve learnt enough to bring it back to you without losing it between seeing and feeling it and putting it here on the internet.
the what of my life is quite a disaster. the how is doing just fine.
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yesterday we were treated to a 22 degree solar halo.
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