Jordi Ruiz Cirera: Documentary Projects and Menonos
Jordi Ruiz Cirera is a documentary photographer and film maker from Barcelona. He won the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2012 with a portrait made inside a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, part of the long project later published as Los Menonos.
Jordi Ruiz Cirera
His portfolio is at jordiruizphotography.com, split between personal projects, editorial, commercial and portrait work, and films. The biography on that site gives a BA in design from Elisava in Barcelona in 2007 and an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from the London College of Communication in 2011. He was based in London in the years around the Taylor Wessing win and is now based in Geneva.
The same page lists editorial clients including the New York Times, the Financial Times, Le Monde M Magazine and the Telegraph Magazine, and institutional work for UNHCR and Medecins Sans Frontieres. His later projects include The United Soya Republic, on industrial agriculture in South America, and more recent exhibited work in Switzerland.
Los Menonos
The project page dates the photographs to 2010 and 2011 and places them in Mennonite colonies in the Santa Cruz region of eastern Bolivia. These are conservative Low German speaking communities that limit the use of photography, which makes the series unusual simply as a matter of access. The page notes a book edition of 750 copies, 104 pages and 57 colour plates, now sold out, with a text by the critic Sean O'Hagan written in 2014. O'Hagan's text calls the work a portrait of a community of self-styled, self-willed outsiders.
What the pictures show is largely domestic. Interiors, farm work, children, women at home. The restraint is not a stylistic flourish, it follows from the terms on which the photographs could be made at all.
The 2012 Taylor Wessing prize
Ruiz Cirera took first prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012 with a portrait of Margarita Teichroeb, a Mennonite woman photographed in the Swift Current Colony in Bolivia in September 2011. The National Portrait Gallery's own judges' commentary on the 2012 prize discusses the picture as a quiet image rather than a high-impact one. The first prize that year was £12,000, and the winner was announced at the Gallery on 5 November 2012.
The award has run annually at the National Portrait Gallery since 2003, first as the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize, with Taylor Wessing attached as sponsor from 2008. It is now presented as the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize. Around sixty prints are selected each year for an exhibition that usually opens in November, and entry is open to photographers anywhere, amateur or professional. Current details are on the gallery's competitions site.
Documentary work in closed communities
Projects made inside groups that object to being photographed turn on time rather than technique. Repeat visits, a known face, permission that is given person by person and can be withdrawn. The resulting pictures tend to be few and plain, and they age well for that reason. Other photographers working this way are listed on the speakers index. The wider archive of documentary projects we cover sits under talks.
Photo Forum is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group. Nothing on this page comes from an interview conducted by us. The facts above are taken from the photographer's own site and from the National Portrait Gallery, both linked in the text.