Read
Behind the photographs.
TITLE Magazine says :
by Callie Rice.
"When I share with you. When I wake up and it is snowing. When I hear good music. When there is an accordion playing in the Parisian metro. When I meet a girl that is shy, when I look at her hair in the wind. When she smiles at me, and when I answer with a shy smile. When some rains flirt with faces in a warm day.” This is when photographer Ruben Brulat is undeniably happiest. However, this is barely comparable to the euphoric feeling of “trying to capture Humanity.”
Brulat’s distinctive images of the bare skinned photographer himself have attracted the attention of Title. “I don’t think that people are afraid of nudity. I also do not think that my work shows an obvious nudity. A body “Naked” out there, in the snow, a frozen lake or in the middle of an urban area, creates for me only this asexual Human, showing and expressing, our vulnerability, smallness, symbiosis and also beauty.” Capturing these photographs is a unique process. Brulat sets the auto timer on his camera after scouring the area for the perfect location, strips down and runs. What we were surprised to learn is more interesting than the image of a pure body lying in the snow. However, rather the way that body’s mind views the world; meet Ruben Brulat.
“Feeling an incredible mix of euphoria and adrenaline, I feel nothing. All the cold or pain is gone like inhibited by the mix of feelings. I feel everything. I settle my body. The time is like suspended. I feel at peace.” Brulat explains of his art. The average person, such as myself, would point to Photoshop. Upon learning that he actually performed these “stunts” I was compelled to ask if he had ever run into any sort of trouble in producing his art. The answer? Simply, “no.” It is difficult to understand the premise of his work being any more than shock therapy, looking to be the next big thing in culture slamming. He explains it repeatedly- nearly rehearsed in pleasantries; “putting my body on the shots to create an asexual Human that shows that we can be in symbiosis but also in complete dissociation.”
He goes on to discuss photography and inspiration, “First of all, photography is the only place where I feel at my place, where I feel I have a complete freedom. It is certainly a way to isolate myself from Humans because they simply fascinate me. I love looking at them, every move, every detail, every word they say. Then I consider each of those in the society, who they are, what are they doing... But quickly I consider the masses I want to understand why people in groups/society do that, how, and why they choose this direction.” Brulat’s fascination with humanity is braided throughout his words, often most denoted in the capitalization of the word itself. “They fascinates me, by their complexity that makes their beauty. That is why I will lead my path from the past to now and the future, to study them, try understanding them, mostly what are they doing the groups, the societies. Why societies are having a recurrent decision over the History. Why are they scared of death? Many questions are as diverse and complex as Humans are, and their path. Because, for me photography for me is capturing Humanity: expressing happiness, sadness, joy, despair, love, or pain, passion or frustrations; all of the feelings that makes us live.”
Brulat has an honest appreciation for the world around him; from the snow he sits on, to those he refers to as “Humans” rather than we, or us. That is until he is asked what he fears most: “We.” His self-proclaimed study of the species delves deeply into the masses- the Humans as a whole, yet the sheer concept holds his greatest fears. ”We. Because of all of the hope I have in us. The fact that we can do good and terrible things, the fact that we can imagine, invent and create. The fact that we can ignore, deny, and destroy. The fact that we can hate and abandon. The fact that we can love. The way that we are so different and diverse; I’m afraid because I hope, I really hope that we will never loose those feelings.” Brulat’s entire world revolves around his “subjects” in life, rather than he as the subject in his art. He encompasses this idea of sincerity, vulnerability, and mystique into a frame- all the while what is more interesting to him than his solitary finished product is the interactions that inspired it.
Ruben Brulat sees his art as a need, there is no choice given in the matter; only strong convictions he needs to express. “Understanding the other one, that is how I see it, in public or in my life. Another that will be able to understand someone else, from where he comes from, how and why the person behave this way, right now. Understanding that we are living with others, that people are influencing us, unconsciously in bad or in a good way: we consider them. All of us, creating who we are since our birth, those complex personalities that makes us unique. Understanding someone else at this level is entering in his intimacy.”
We ask the man who once aspired to be an astronaut, in order to “see the world from far away” to look ahead rather than at those around him, and explain what he wishes for the world. “I wish to see more and more inspiring leaders, not only in politics, people who will be able to bring the Human specie to get new perspectives, and hope. I wish to see more people realize the chance we have, to be in such a great and unique place; that we come from an incredible result of circumstances and from the long evolution. I hope we will realize it in groups, in societies, being able to change things. Being able to continue the long evolution, but I have no doubt about that. I am convinced that Humans are and in the end, or close to the end, good. Finding this force to live, and change things."
_______________________
Wallpaper* Magazine says :
by Nancy Aslop.
"Ruben Brulat bought his first camera just two years ago. But in spite of this relatively late start, something just clicked. ‘I discovered my real passion, and I have not stopped since. I went out all night long, experimenting. I needed to do it – it quickly became something vital for me and I could not stop taking photographs.’
For Brulat, photography is about capturing humanity – as was evidenced by Immaculate, his series of images of a business area both by day and by night. ‘I want to understand why people groups and societies behave the way they do.
What shocked me with Immaculate was that this neighbourhood lived just for a system, and when at night there is no one to activate that system, it dies. There is absolutely no love, no happiness, no sadness. Just nothing.
I am fascinated by places where the beauty of human beings has gone.’
It makes sense then that Brulat is currently focusing his attentions on a new series of photographs for 2010 about the human in the environment, depicting ‘the vulnerability and the smallness of our species.’ In ten years time, he hopes to have brought both happiness and sadness to people via his work, but most of all hopes that not all his expectations will come to fruition.
‘Otherwise, in a way, it will be really boring!’ And that’s one adjective we would not associate with Brulat."
_______________________
Immaculate
by Dan Nisand, writer
"Every night, the leaving of all the businessman and employees of the business district “la Défense”, turn it into a no man’s land. Because at night, this international economic center, made of an agglomerate of business towers grown like a steel forest on a gigantic pedestrian flagstone, becomes an outskirts, an urban desert without even a soul to haunt it.
It’s this ghost town that doesn’t seem to wait for anything, that the photographer Ruben Brulat explores, night after night, from footbridge to parking lot, from floors to stairs. Each snapshot has required from the artist dozens of hours of wandering, until he finds a spot whose nothingness strikes a chord in him; a place where the light, the architecture, the materials and the relief create an incongruous and tragic scenery. Afterwards, there’s still hours of observation, impregnation, dreaming. But when the vision appears, it immediately becomes desire, a pressing demand to achieve. To reach this paradoxical symbiosis that he is so gifted to create, the artist has the urge to get naked right here, right now. He has to take possession of the place at all costs; he has to project himself as a human being. Leaving without going all the way is out of the question; it would be fault. The photographer then, founds himself truly naked in his own lens, buried in his own eye.
To fully understand Ruben Brulat, you have to put yourself in the place of this lonely being, who explores every corner of this silent labyrinth, and who suddenly decides, in the middle of the night, to offer himself to the coldness of a place, alone and naked, to make one with the steel, glass and concrete. Just imagine his quest, how he hunt down the right location, imagine the adrenaline running through his veins when he gets undressed and offers his fragile and vulnerable body to the horror of a soul and history-less place.
Ruben Brulat can’t stop himself from exploring every corner of this unique district, he forbids himself to neglect any parcel and it shows in its photography where no detail is left out. Precise to the excess, exploring each centimeter of this too bright or, at the contrary, too quickly damaged spaces. The shadows of the skeletal empty towers are scrutinized to the very depths of them and reveal they gigantic and abandoned reliefs. In the middle of the composition, a naked human body, successively fragile, tortured, in a dream, describes the human life that rises in the most hostile environment.
We are at the heart of the biggest European business Center and there is nothing. The power system lies dormant, waiting for the creatures with flesh and feelings to reactivate it. It seems as if only the Economy, feeding herself with numbers, networks and transactions, manages to survive in this environment. While we, the humans, living on the feelings, sensations, even suffering – all what’s precisely absent from this place – aren’t allowed.
From one photography to the other, a metaphor is made. It becomes clear that where the economical power triumph no life being belongs there. The life that irresistibly and happily insinuate itself everywhere, has been driven away. Even the vegetation, placed there by a program, seems to suffocate in her constraint. Even when she forces herself to take her rights back in the spots the town planning has forgotten, her small victories make the life look like a macabre and obscene phenomenon.
At first sight, the Immaculate series comes under conceptual photography. And yet, the presence of an humble and discreet body, naked without being provocative, sexless, unidentified, makes it a different sort of representation. Strangely, a certain beauty emerges from this ugliness. Is it because of the body ? Because of the strong inspiration of the photographer ? Sometimes, during his nightly wandering, Ruben Brulat encounters a lonely, ghostly, exhausted or grief-stricken soul. Suddenly, a shy and strange “Good evening” rings in the silence. Humanity, after all. Maybe that’s where it comes from, the utter happiness, the feverish euphoria, that takes over the artist, when he takes home one of these eerie/ supernatural snapshot/photography, from the victory of having took a portrait of the humanity out of this place that deprives the life of its essentials rights."
TITLE Magazine says :
by Callie Rice.
"When I share with you. When I wake up and it is snowing. When I hear good music. When there is an accordion playing in the Parisian metro. When I meet a girl that is shy, when I look at her hair in the wind. When she smiles at me, and when I answer with a shy smile. When some rains flirt with faces in a warm day.” This is when photographer Ruben Brulat is undeniably happiest. However, this is barely comparable to the euphoric feeling of “trying to capture Humanity.”
Brulat’s distinctive images of the bare skinned photographer himself have attracted the attention of Title. “I don’t think that people are afraid of nudity. I also do not think that my work shows an obvious nudity. A body “Naked” out there, in the snow, a frozen lake or in the middle of an urban area, creates for me only this asexual Human, showing and expressing, our vulnerability, smallness, symbiosis and also beauty.” Capturing these photographs is a unique process. Brulat sets the auto timer on his camera after scouring the area for the perfect location, strips down and runs. What we were surprised to learn is more interesting than the image of a pure body lying in the snow. However, rather the way that body’s mind views the world; meet Ruben Brulat.
“Feeling an incredible mix of euphoria and adrenaline, I feel nothing. All the cold or pain is gone like inhibited by the mix of feelings. I feel everything. I settle my body. The time is like suspended. I feel at peace.” Brulat explains of his art. The average person, such as myself, would point to Photoshop. Upon learning that he actually performed these “stunts” I was compelled to ask if he had ever run into any sort of trouble in producing his art. The answer? Simply, “no.” It is difficult to understand the premise of his work being any more than shock therapy, looking to be the next big thing in culture slamming. He explains it repeatedly- nearly rehearsed in pleasantries; “putting my body on the shots to create an asexual Human that shows that we can be in symbiosis but also in complete dissociation.”
He goes on to discuss photography and inspiration, “First of all, photography is the only place where I feel at my place, where I feel I have a complete freedom. It is certainly a way to isolate myself from Humans because they simply fascinate me. I love looking at them, every move, every detail, every word they say. Then I consider each of those in the society, who they are, what are they doing... But quickly I consider the masses I want to understand why people in groups/society do that, how, and why they choose this direction.” Brulat’s fascination with humanity is braided throughout his words, often most denoted in the capitalization of the word itself. “They fascinates me, by their complexity that makes their beauty. That is why I will lead my path from the past to now and the future, to study them, try understanding them, mostly what are they doing the groups, the societies. Why societies are having a recurrent decision over the History. Why are they scared of death? Many questions are as diverse and complex as Humans are, and their path. Because, for me photography for me is capturing Humanity: expressing happiness, sadness, joy, despair, love, or pain, passion or frustrations; all of the feelings that makes us live.”
Brulat has an honest appreciation for the world around him; from the snow he sits on, to those he refers to as “Humans” rather than we, or us. That is until he is asked what he fears most: “We.” His self-proclaimed study of the species delves deeply into the masses- the Humans as a whole, yet the sheer concept holds his greatest fears. ”We. Because of all of the hope I have in us. The fact that we can do good and terrible things, the fact that we can imagine, invent and create. The fact that we can ignore, deny, and destroy. The fact that we can hate and abandon. The fact that we can love. The way that we are so different and diverse; I’m afraid because I hope, I really hope that we will never loose those feelings.” Brulat’s entire world revolves around his “subjects” in life, rather than he as the subject in his art. He encompasses this idea of sincerity, vulnerability, and mystique into a frame- all the while what is more interesting to him than his solitary finished product is the interactions that inspired it.
Ruben Brulat sees his art as a need, there is no choice given in the matter; only strong convictions he needs to express. “Understanding the other one, that is how I see it, in public or in my life. Another that will be able to understand someone else, from where he comes from, how and why the person behave this way, right now. Understanding that we are living with others, that people are influencing us, unconsciously in bad or in a good way: we consider them. All of us, creating who we are since our birth, those complex personalities that makes us unique. Understanding someone else at this level is entering in his intimacy.”
We ask the man who once aspired to be an astronaut, in order to “see the world from far away” to look ahead rather than at those around him, and explain what he wishes for the world. “I wish to see more and more inspiring leaders, not only in politics, people who will be able to bring the Human specie to get new perspectives, and hope. I wish to see more people realize the chance we have, to be in such a great and unique place; that we come from an incredible result of circumstances and from the long evolution. I hope we will realize it in groups, in societies, being able to change things. Being able to continue the long evolution, but I have no doubt about that. I am convinced that Humans are and in the end, or close to the end, good. Finding this force to live, and change things."
_______________________
Wallpaper* Magazine says :
by Nancy Aslop.
"Ruben Brulat bought his first camera just two years ago. But in spite of this relatively late start, something just clicked. ‘I discovered my real passion, and I have not stopped since. I went out all night long, experimenting. I needed to do it – it quickly became something vital for me and I could not stop taking photographs.’
For Brulat, photography is about capturing humanity – as was evidenced by Immaculate, his series of images of a business area both by day and by night. ‘I want to understand why people groups and societies behave the way they do.
What shocked me with Immaculate was that this neighbourhood lived just for a system, and when at night there is no one to activate that system, it dies. There is absolutely no love, no happiness, no sadness. Just nothing.
I am fascinated by places where the beauty of human beings has gone.’
It makes sense then that Brulat is currently focusing his attentions on a new series of photographs for 2010 about the human in the environment, depicting ‘the vulnerability and the smallness of our species.’ In ten years time, he hopes to have brought both happiness and sadness to people via his work, but most of all hopes that not all his expectations will come to fruition.
‘Otherwise, in a way, it will be really boring!’ And that’s one adjective we would not associate with Brulat."
_______________________
Immaculate
by Dan Nisand, writer
"Every night, the leaving of all the businessman and employees of the business district “la Défense”, turn it into a no man’s land. Because at night, this international economic center, made of an agglomerate of business towers grown like a steel forest on a gigantic pedestrian flagstone, becomes an outskirts, an urban desert without even a soul to haunt it.
It’s this ghost town that doesn’t seem to wait for anything, that the photographer Ruben Brulat explores, night after night, from footbridge to parking lot, from floors to stairs. Each snapshot has required from the artist dozens of hours of wandering, until he finds a spot whose nothingness strikes a chord in him; a place where the light, the architecture, the materials and the relief create an incongruous and tragic scenery. Afterwards, there’s still hours of observation, impregnation, dreaming. But when the vision appears, it immediately becomes desire, a pressing demand to achieve. To reach this paradoxical symbiosis that he is so gifted to create, the artist has the urge to get naked right here, right now. He has to take possession of the place at all costs; he has to project himself as a human being. Leaving without going all the way is out of the question; it would be fault. The photographer then, founds himself truly naked in his own lens, buried in his own eye.
To fully understand Ruben Brulat, you have to put yourself in the place of this lonely being, who explores every corner of this silent labyrinth, and who suddenly decides, in the middle of the night, to offer himself to the coldness of a place, alone and naked, to make one with the steel, glass and concrete. Just imagine his quest, how he hunt down the right location, imagine the adrenaline running through his veins when he gets undressed and offers his fragile and vulnerable body to the horror of a soul and history-less place.
Ruben Brulat can’t stop himself from exploring every corner of this unique district, he forbids himself to neglect any parcel and it shows in its photography where no detail is left out. Precise to the excess, exploring each centimeter of this too bright or, at the contrary, too quickly damaged spaces. The shadows of the skeletal empty towers are scrutinized to the very depths of them and reveal they gigantic and abandoned reliefs. In the middle of the composition, a naked human body, successively fragile, tortured, in a dream, describes the human life that rises in the most hostile environment.
We are at the heart of the biggest European business Center and there is nothing. The power system lies dormant, waiting for the creatures with flesh and feelings to reactivate it. It seems as if only the Economy, feeding herself with numbers, networks and transactions, manages to survive in this environment. While we, the humans, living on the feelings, sensations, even suffering – all what’s precisely absent from this place – aren’t allowed.
From one photography to the other, a metaphor is made. It becomes clear that where the economical power triumph no life being belongs there. The life that irresistibly and happily insinuate itself everywhere, has been driven away. Even the vegetation, placed there by a program, seems to suffocate in her constraint. Even when she forces herself to take her rights back in the spots the town planning has forgotten, her small victories make the life look like a macabre and obscene phenomenon.
At first sight, the Immaculate series comes under conceptual photography. And yet, the presence of an humble and discreet body, naked without being provocative, sexless, unidentified, makes it a different sort of representation. Strangely, a certain beauty emerges from this ugliness. Is it because of the body ? Because of the strong inspiration of the photographer ? Sometimes, during his nightly wandering, Ruben Brulat encounters a lonely, ghostly, exhausted or grief-stricken soul. Suddenly, a shy and strange “Good evening” rings in the silence. Humanity, after all. Maybe that’s where it comes from, the utter happiness, the feverish euphoria, that takes over the artist, when he takes home one of these eerie/ supernatural snapshot/photography, from the victory of having took a portrait of the humanity out of this place that deprives the life of its essentials rights."