Florian Ruiz

Concept

In the snowy landscapes of the heights of Fukushima, I have captured the invisible pain of radiation. Inspired by the Japanese engravings, I hoped to capture the ever-shifting perceptions of nature, where radiation accumulates the most.
With a geiger counter, I measured the radioactive contamination’s presence in becquerels (Bq), a unit that expresses atom disintegration and its mutation's number per second. By a process of staggered superimpression, I intended to show the atom’s alteration in my pictures. The transparency effects, the broken perspectives give rise to a shape that is in motion, an impermanent world as in traditional Japanese engravings.
Then, I created a vibration, a departure from the reality of the subject that
reveals the presence of radiation in the image. The process reinvents and twists the very landscape, leading to a sort of vertigo or malaise, a threatening danger hidden behind the purity of the white of the landscapes.

Vita

After a thesis in law and a license in history, I have developed photographic projects to express the atmospheres, feelings, and sensations of desolate places.

Installed for 10 years in Tokyo and marked by the catastrophe of Fukushima, in my recent works, I sought to test the bounds of photography by challenging its ability to render an image of what is invisible to the eye, as the radioactivity, by means of time and, distortion.

I’m using assembly, collage, super impression; processes that reinvent and twist the very landscape. I favor a pinhole camera to portray the unexpected, the fortuitous, and the deformed as a multiple reality.

Awards:
Fine Art Photographer of the year 2016
Bourse du Talent 2016 finalist
Moscow Foto Awards honorable mention 2016
Arpia prize 2016
QPN Award finaliste 2016
LensCulture Earth Awards finalist 2015
QPN Award finaliste 2015
Arpia prize 2014
Sony World Photography Awards 2013 second of the professional « conceptual » category
International Emerging Artist Award finalist 2013

Publications:
2016 Le Monde Magazine, Prismphotomagazine#23, Scopionetwork
2015 Aint-Bad magazine, Tenten Magazine #2, Roomsmagazine, Dodho Magazine
2014 Silvershotz Magazine, ArtPhotoMag, Dodho Magazine, TWTGE Magazine
2013 Prism Photo Magazine, FKmagazine, Emergence revue#2
2012 Urbanautica Magazine, LPVmagazine, F-Stop Magazine Issue #53, Prism Photo Magazine, Aksgar magazine, photoworks magazine, Magazine European Photography