Guadalupe Ruiz

From Bogotá to Switzerland—Distance Makes the Everyday Newly Visible

Ruiz was born in Bogotá in 1978, moved to Switzerland in 1996, and studied photography at institutions including ECAL in Lausanne. She is now based in Biel/Bienne and connects her work to the experience of moving between Colombia and Switzerland^*1.

In an interview, Ruiz explains that physical distance from her family and the need to describe her background in another language prompted her to look again at people close to her and to train her eye^*2. Migration enters the work less as an abstract theme than as a practical condition of photographing: whom she looks at from what distance, and what must be explained before an experience can be shared.

Choosing Photography to Look Precisely

Ruiz has said that she chose photography because she wants to show what she sees as precisely and concretely as possible. She gives priority to looking closely at the people and things in front of her and retaining their differences in the photograph, rather than transforming reality through special effects or elaborate staging^*2.

In an interview with FotoTazo, Ruiz likewise recalls that everyday life in Bogotá suddenly looked new after she moved to Switzerland, leading her to photograph family, friends, and interiors^*3. Distance from home made her attentive to furniture, colors, clothing, and food that she might previously have passed over.

Bogotá D.C.—Reading Urban Class Through Domestic Interiors

In Bogotá D.C., Ruiz photographed the interiors and exteriors of homes without their residents, avoiding portraits as stand-ins for Bogotá’s social classes. She explains that she used natural light and a medium-format camera and organized 120 images—beds, living rooms, façades, front and back gardens, diplomas—into a grid by social stratum and subject^*2. The photobook Bogotá D.C., published by Scheidegger & Spiess, turns differences among homes into a structure for comparison^*5.

The distance involved in returning from Switzerland to photograph Bogotá did not lead Ruiz to consolidate home into a nostalgic image. She has said that she is more interested in the present than the past, while recognizing that photographing places that are disappearing may give the images documentary value later^*2. The housing photographs in Bogotá D.C. are therefore organized around the furniture, decoration, and architecture of a particular moment instead of one symbolic image of belonging.

In a 2011 essay, Santiago Rueda Fajardo notes that Ruiz’s work can at times display a deliberately constructed banality, while praising Bogotá D.C. for its curious observation of the urban environment and its ability to find strangeness in ordinary life. His observation that the publishing environment for photobooks in Colombia was itself limited at the time also helps clarify the significance of organizing domestic interiors as a comparative sequence in a book. ^*21

Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie—A Book of Personal Classification

Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie gathers photographs of architecture, art, society, food, and nature made while traveling and edits 645 images into a private system of classification. Flowers, domestic decoration, potatoes, corn, and sweets become entries within the same body of knowledge^*7.

Ruiz has said that she carried out as much of the process as possible herself, from shooting and layout to offset printing, in order to give digital photographs a more tactile material presence^*8. The encyclopedic form does not claim comprehensive authority; it becomes a small editorial device that openly shows what the artist chooses to place together.

WorldCat records Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie as a 2015 publication containing 645 photographs. The large number of images is not used to claim completeness. It creates enough repetition to test how personal categories such as “fruit,” “furniture,” and “travel” differ from the supposedly objective knowledge system of an encyclopedia. ^*23

Cutting and Reprinting—NY Apples and Pears

NY Apples and Pears is a publication made by reprinting photographs of apples and pears shot in New York State, cutting them out, and rearranging them into new still-life compositions. Ruiz describes the process of reprinting the photographs, cutting out their forms, and recombining them^*2. Published by Kodoji Press in 2017, the book contains eleven black-and-white images across twenty pages^*9.

Perimeter notes that the repetition of fruit creates a classificatory, pop-like surface and also connects to the verbal association between New York and the “Big Apple”^*10. Ruiz does not leave the apples and pears as straightforward catalog images. She prints them, cuts around their outlines, and places them onto new pages. Fruit that had been one category within Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie becomes the material for a new still life made from printed photographs.

Making Family Time into a Book for Her Child

In Lupita, je garde un abricot…, Ruiz edited photographs and writing about her native Bogotá into a book addressed to her son, who is growing up in Switzerland^*11. Because he did not experience the same Bogotá in the same period, the book avoids the continuity of a conventional family album and instead passes on fragments of streets, objects, and memory through words and photographs. The book brings a mother’s memory and a child’s unexperienced place onto the same pages.

In the 2025 project El Libro ilustrado / The Picture Book and the exhibition Consuelo, Ruiz combined staged images made at home, analog photographs of her son accumulated over many years, and various collected images in a single book^*12. The home appears as a place of making where knowledge passes between generations through photography, embroidery, reading, and workshops.

Petit Suisse—Typologizing a Child’s Constructions

Petit Suisse records small sculptures made by Ruiz’s son from materials close at hand, using a consistent photographic procedure. Images Vevey describes the constructions as metaphors for contemporary Swiss society and reads the child’s ability to combine several origins more naturally than the artist herself^*13.

The constructions are temporary objects made at home, but in Petit Suisse each is photographed individually in the studio and becomes part of a comparable series. Images Vevey describes the project as Ruiz photographing her son’s constructions “like real artworks,” recording the creativity of early childhood^*13.

ECAL also presented Petit Suisse at Festival Images Vevey as a series born from Ruiz’s relationship with her son. Together with the fact that she graduated from ECAL in 2002, this establishes a path from her photographic education in Switzerland to the typological treatment of objects produced daily within the home. ^*22

Photojournalism and the Documentary Value Images Acquire Later

As a student, Ruiz photographed daily life around the FARC in the demilitarized zone for San Vicente del Caguán. She has said that questions of permission and withdrawal, danger, and uncertainty about her position as a reporter led her to leave the material unedited for years and later self-publish it as a historical document^*15.

Nada Es Eterno (Oodee, 2014) is a limited twenty-eight-page publication concerned with family representation. Oodee describes Ruiz photographing members of her family in everyday situations while addressing identity, social representation, and stereotypes surrounding family^*6. The subject differs from the reporting context of San Vicente del Caguán, yet both works show how the moment and form of publication shape the meaning of photographic material.

Recent Work on Reproduction and Cultural Translation

In the 2025 exhibition Consuelo, photographs appeared alongside furniture, household objects, and collected material. Art Viewer’s installation documentation shows that Ruiz’s recent work has expanded beyond the photobook into installations that include reproduced objects and items from domestic life^*17.

Ruiz was selected as a winner of the 2025 Swiss Art Awards^*14. FHNW published the jury’s account, describing her sustained engagement with exchange, imitation, translation, appropriation, and reproduction, and relating those concerns to her experience of migration^*18. From Bogotá D.C. to her recent work, the recurring question is concrete: what happens to the use and reading of a photograph or object when it passes into another country, page, or generation.

Using Photobooks to Compare Distant Places and Generations

Recent exhibition records also trace a movement from a photobook-centered practice toward installation. Contemporary Art Library documents a 2019 group exhibition and the 2025 exhibition Consuelo^*16. AICA Switzerland discussed the 2025 presentation as a small retrospective linking early and recent works and highlighted questions of migration, reproduction, and collecting^*19.

Photography Now records Bogotá D.C. as a solo exhibition at Centre de la Photographie Genève in 2004, followed by I feel it all at the same institution in 2007. The circulation of Ruiz’s work across photography centers, publishers, and festivals corresponds to a practice in which the photobook has remained a major form of presentation. ^*4

As ArtNexus’s feature on Colombian photobooks suggests, Ruiz’s work belongs to both Latin American photobook culture and the contemporary-art and publishing environment of Switzerland^*20. Bogotá D.C. uses a sequence of different domestic interiors to show class distinctions within a city; Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie divides 645 images into private categories; NY Apples and Pears isolates fruit from that system and physically recuts the printed images. The three books do different jobs: comparing housing, constructing a private encyclopedia, and reworking the printed photograph.

Placed chronologically, the three books also show a change in what publication does. Bogotá D.C. compares 120 photographs across a grid of social strata and subjects. Kleine Fotoenzyklopädie divides 645 travel photographs into personal categories. In NY Apples and Pears, one category already printed in a book is reprinted and cut apart to become material for another work. Publication becomes the place where each project establishes its own rules of comparison, classification, or reworking.