Cristóbal Ruiz

Roland is a street musician from Kingston, Canada. He was playing his saxophone on a bus station in North Vancouver. People love his music and his carisma with kids, and it's hard to not stop and listen when he is playing. During his break I came up to him and chat for a while. After I asked him if I could take his portrait and he quickly grabbed his saxophone and said yes please. I have never seen someone so happy to get his photo taken. This was the closest wall we found and made a great color pallete for the portrait. His eyes tell his story, his music gave a great number of people joy and happinnes everyday. You can still see him play music in North Vancouver and Downtown Vancouver. A few months after, this photo made me won a Canadian Art photo contest, and now his portrait is hang up in a few places in Vancouver. 

Mrs Juanita is a 60 year old lady from Viña del Mar, Chile. She lives in a tiny home in front of the pacific ocean. Besides the fact that she does not have many relatives or friends alive, she still laughs like she was 15 years old. Every day I passed beside her, she would talk and ask me about my family. We would talk for 5 or 10 minutes and I would always end up the conversation asking if I could take her portrait, getting always the same answer: Not today, but maybe next time. It was only the last day before I left Viña del Mar that she agreed to get her photo taken. A few days later I got a message from a good friend telling me that he person who takes care of Mrs. Juanita would like to show this photos to a social worker to get the goverment to improve her living conditions. We are still waiting for an answer. Taken during October 2015.

George is a Vietnam veteran, but also a fruit picker. During summer 2014 in Kelowna, Canada, me and a group of friends spent a few months working in a farm, picking cherries for a living. We slept in a camp full of awesome people, mostly young in between 20 and 30, french-canadians. One of the characters was George, who would sit in front of his room everyday, and read for hours. During one of the last days of the harvest, he decided to get a haircut from Emily, a french-canadian girl, also a fruit picker. Taken in Kelowna, BC, Canada. Summer 2014 . (Film, 35mm)

Jeffrey Powell is a musician from Los Angeles California. I met Jeffrey on a corner in Vancouver while I was studying photography. I asked him if I could do a portrait of him and he easily agreed. Surprisingly he knew so much about photography he could guess the settings I was using for the portrait. He continously makes a living out of his music in the streets of Vancouver, Canada.