Mike Ruth
Movement Festival, Detroit, 2018
Artist Statement of Michael L. Ruth
Since my early days of experimenting with photography, I have been fascinated with moving objects, both natural and man-made. Taking photographs at extremely slow shutter speeds creates incredible shapes and mystery, never truly knowing what you are getting until the photo is revealed. Long exposures of moving objects such as cars, trains, or flowing rivers conjure up delicate ribbons of movement.
It was revealed to me recently that many of my photographic images center around water. Why is that? Water is important to us, as the giver of life, sustenance, soothing to the soul, all those heady things. To me it is all that, but there is something else. The visual stimulation from the movement of water is one thing that draws me to the edge of the shore. Water is in constant motion and therefore is always changing. Like a ZEN saying I once read: “You can’t step in the same river twice.”
The options provided by the digital process, from images shot with long exposures to merging of multiple time lapse exposures using various computer-based enhancements to the final printing of that image, have allowed me to move into a new genre with new techniques. Presently many of my images are composited with multiple photographs, at least five. Some combine up to 35 individual photos.
While photography is my prime focus (75% to 25%), my passion for graphic work stems from my career as a set designer and builder for WOSU-TV (Columbus, OH) and UW-Stout Teleproduction Center (Menomonie, WI), the first two jobs I had after graduation from College in the mid 70’s. Though these images have their birth in TV and Detroit, the majority of these graphic visuals were produced here in Eden Prairie during the pandemic.
For myself, this becomes more rewarding due to the fact the fact I am red-green colorblind and have difficulty seeing most colors in their proper values. Therefore, like in the 1970s TV production when there were still a vast amount of black and white TVs in use, a production artist had to compensate for this by making sure the colors had enough contrast to each other when they aligned on a set or a camera graphic, all pre-computer aided art. Therefore the colors in my ‘OpArt” projects are vibrant and contrasty. With the aid of a friend in Detroit, she and I designed my own color palette. Unless it is a black-and-white image, in my photography the colors are also tweaked.
I earned a B.A. in Photography and Cinema from Ohio State, an M.Ed. in Graphic Communications from UW-Stout, and an ED.D. from the University of Minnesota. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, I taught graphic communications at Central Michigan University and animation and special effects at Minnesota State University Moorhead. After 28 years of living in Fargo-Moorhead, retired and moved to Detroit, where I lived for five years working as an events production coordinator. I returned to Minnesota in the summer of 2019 and am busy creating photographic images and Op Art.