Bio / Artist Statement

 Euphus Ruth grew up in Bruce, Mississippi. After college in Memphis, he made his home in Greenville, a Mississippi Delta town along the Mississippi River where he spent his career working for a public utility. Drawn to photography since his teenage years, Ruth is now retired and works full-time as a photographer. Using large and ultra-large format vintage cameras, he practices collodion and film photography. His images center on aging architecture, cemeteries, cityscapes, and landscapes—places he revisits again and again to witness and record the quiet changes wrought by time, nature, and human intervention.

 Much of the work shown here is drawn from three bodies of work—Cemetery Walker, G-town Baby, and The Goddess Project. Made as ambrotypes and tintypes, or as contact prints from glass or film negatives, they are created using the historic wet and dry collodion processes. Their scale is determined by the cameras themselves; these images are not enlarged. Each plate is a singular object, and each print exists in a small, finite edition.

For me, photography is a practice of process and presence. I work with antiquated tools and methods not only out of reverence for the history of the medium, but for the ritual they demand. This way of making requires patience, care, and a daily devotion to skill. The use of precious metals and volatile chemicals asks for discipline and reflection, while the slowness of the process binds me to place. Nothing in this work is rushed; each image is made in time, and with it.

  My current photographic projects consists primarily of panoramas made with the Cirkut Camera, a rotating film camera with interchangable focal lengths.