Tania Ruda: Summer, Together | MONOVISIONS - Black & White Photography Magazine

MonoVisions Black & White Photo Contest 2027

Summer, Together is a black-and-white photographic series by Ukrainian photographer and visual artist Tania Ruda, made during a family summer in Normandy, France.

For many years, Ruda has photographed her own family from within their everyday life. In Summer, Together, the camera follows children moving through long summer days – playing, swimming, eating, resting, running, touching, laughing, and inventing games. Adults appear and disappear around them. Nothing is staged, and nothing particularly extraordinary happens.

This ordinariness is at the heart of the project.

The photographs explore the quiet happiness that often goes unnoticed while it is being lived: the freedom of childhood, physical closeness, boredom, noise, affection, and the rare luxury of having time together. Rather than documenting significant events, Ruda is interested in the small gestures and fleeting situations that gradually become family memory.

Her approach combines the immediacy of documentary photography with a strong visual sensitivity to light, movement, bodies, and composition. Trained as a painter and art historian, Ruda often works at the intersection of documentary and fine-art photography. In Summer, Together, intense summer light, deep shadows, blurred movement, and physical proximity create a visual rhythm that is both intimate and cinematic.

Although the photographs were made in Normandy, the project is ultimately less about a particular destination than about a temporary state of life – a summer in which days seem endless and being together feels completely ordinary.

Only later do such moments reveal their weight.

Tania Ruda is a Ukrainian photographer and visual artist based in Prague. Her work explores intimacy, the body, childhood, family, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life.

Website: tania-ruda.format.com
Instagram: @tania.ruda.photo