Lenny Ruiz

Lenny Ruiz is a Venezuelan street and documentary photographer based in Buenos Aires. His inspiration comes from the urban environment and its endless array of stories to capture. His style is influenced by Saul Leiter, William Eggleston, Ernst Haas, Vivian Maier, and Fred Herzog , among others. His process involves creating with urban elements, linking everyday situations with geometry, juxtaposition, and, above all, using color as the predominant element in his compositions.

“ I live in  Buenos Aires, Argentina,  where I work freelance as a  web developer . I began my formal studies with a diploma in  Photographic Techniques and Arts  at  Avecofa   Caracas (2017), and I completed a diploma in  Cinematography  at the  National Film School  in Caracas (2019). I've been taking photos for 10 years, ever since I bought my first DSLR. Since then, photography has become a very important part of my life. I tend to spend a good part of my free time taking urban walks and looking for new perspectives of the city. I've amassed a collection of photographs  from around the world;   Caracas ,  Havana ,  Buenos Aires , Santiago de Chile , Uruguay , Turkey , and Spain are some of the places I've photographed.

I love urban architecture and all it has to offer: standing on a sidewalk and feeling how a street scene has the potential to become, when it reaches the computer screen, something that creates a sense of strangeness, a dreamlike moment, as if suspended in time. As if that moment were precisely where something is about to happen.

More than a message, what I aim for is to create atmospheres, an emotional tension, to emphasize the space surrounding an element through tones, color, light, and shadows—that's what I like to convey through my photographs. I want to be able to link the world of abstraction to reality through anchors in our own reality, a passageway between our world and fantasy, provoking a secondary state, a slightly hypnotic sensation of simply being somewhere else or being something else.”