Amalias Street 5a is, in many ways, a documentation of a lost time and place. Ruka’s idea for this series was that the collective address could be seen as a miniature model of Latvia. The wooden building from 1912 had some 40 small flats housing people of assorted backgrounds and ages: old, young, families with kids, pets, and the owners also lived there with their family. It had a large yard that was used frequently by tenants in the warm season – a natural meeting place for them. Ruka spent a lot of time with the tenants and worked on her series for three summers. This place has changed radically. The building was refurbished and only affluent people can afford to live there now. Today, the series prompts us to reflect on processes that cause social change, such as market economy and gentrification, and also raises the question of the right to a place to live.

Inta Ruka (b. 1958) learned and developed her photographic skills when she became a member of a photography club in Riga in the 1970s. She takes analogue photos, usually with a Rolleiflex camera, and develops them herself. The black-and-white aesthetics is consistent throughout her oeuvre. Ruka has exhibited at The Modern Art Museum and The Contemporary Museum of Photography, Stockholm as well as in Great Britain, Germany and France. She is represented in several international collections. Ruka has published photo books, including presentations of the series My Country People and Amalias Street 5a, and a retrospective volume, People I Know.

The exhibition features the documentary The Photographer from Riga, directed by Maud Nycander. This film portrays both Ruka and a country in transformation. In addition to Nycander, Lars Tunbjörk was one of the film’s cinematographers, and the three became close friends and colleagues over the years. Incidentally, the Lars Tunbjörk Centre for Photography has an iconic photographic portrait of Tunbjörk taken by Inta Ruka in Balvi, Latvia.