Ruddy Roye

April 28, 2025

Sighting, fighting, writing, at the end is my war…
These four words are my constant fear whenever I walk into a new space to approach an assignment. An assignment has never been just that for me - ofterntimes it stands as the flayed representation of a people’s suffering doubling as LIFE.
A few months ago I drove into Gary Indiana armed with my research, my cameras, and a story that I scanned throughly before jumping into the Ford F150 truck.
That is how these road trips usually start. It doesn’t take long before I am confronted by the crucial and underlying optics of the place, accompanied by the deeper recesses of its braided narratives; oftentimes in the form of lyrics, graffiti, pushing itself unto a forgotten street and revealing themselves as the culture of the place.
In some ways Gary Indiana was no different from the Cairo Illinois, Pork and Beans Housing in Florida, Roger Williams Housing in Alabama or Outhwaite Housing in Ohio, except for the small army of residents who decided to fight for the Soul of Gary.
I walked into a wall of fear, residents voicing their panic of me being “just like every other photographer, here to show the dilapidated buildings as the face of the city.’
And while I empathized with everyone’s plea, there were two things that were real, the buildings were there, broken, and breaking with its creaking sound rippling across the 54 square mile city like a tsunami. The second thing was there is a Mayor backed by a constituency that refused to surrender to the disenfranchisement of their city.
At the end, ultimately, I have a story to tell. And I try to shape the reason I was there with the language that I see, the fighting, my writing - with the hope of balancing the war. It is never clean, and there is always blood and death. Whether it spills out on my LCD screen or on the streets that I photograph, - ultimately my aim is to tell a version of the truth - one frame at a time.

March 16, 2025

For all those who have asked about my large format journey - here is a post to celebrate my photography journey.
Back then it was a 4x5 Toyo camera with a Rodenstock 135mm f/5.6 apo-sironar-s. It felt like my perfect pen. Back in jamaica as a young writer, I dreamed of owning a Montblanc of any sort just so I could define myself as a proper writer. The camera felt like my pen.
But back in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, I found myself driving from New York to Mobile Alabama to write the stories of the people who Harry Belafonte described as the “forgotten people” of America.
As I drove from city to city, I confronted the many stories that wrote themselves on my lenses. If I could see, scratch that, as long as I was patient enough and strong enough to consume all the triumphs and pain that hung on to these stories, then I could write a more perfect image.
These are but 13 of over 400 images I photographed in that series. A project I dubbed “The Sojourn” speaks to the amazing toughness and adaptability of a people who have always had to overcome. The world has seen only about 20 images from this series, but a lie - and a jealous competitor made me shelves these images back in 2005 until now.
Seeing where we are in this Union, my heart tells me it is time to again document the voices of people who are wobbling under the strain of a struggling economy.
The 8x10 is my second iteration into this world of large format photography. As an outsider, I use this unique vantage point; using my experience of a man from very humble beginnings, watching the country that all of us immigrants aspired to travel to, - watching it decline to look like the countries we took planes, rafts, boats, deserts and arduous terrains from, to seek a better life.
The Sojourn continues.

February 8,2025
Class distinctions and their ability to segregate the various parts of our very diverse society stands as one of Jamaica’s most common tool in how it maintains the polarization and separation of the poor and the working class from the capitalist class in the country.
Imagine, that in 2025, there are still some who believe that the lighter skinned you are the less likely you are to fall behind the stiff regulations, high “taxes” and “expensive permits” - set by “gatekeepers” - seeking to “ hold down the advancement of ghetto youths.”
This is a common feeling amongst the poor and working class people in the country.
So it is no wonder that while interrogating and interviewing young riders for this piece, part of the complaint I heard the most was how costly it was for the ‘working’ riders to earn a living or find support for their events.
Like every other sector in Jamaica, bikers “suffer” from the same issues of stereotypes based on their geography.
Simply put - uptown versus downtown.
If you can ride a motor cycle to a soca event you stand a better chance of riding all day without being harassed by the police, but if you are riding to a dancehall session, you might end up breaking every known road code and law in Jamaica. Tho both groups attract patrons of varying skin colour, there is a high probability that the lighter skinned persons in both groups tend to have an easier life - or this is the general feeling.
Going back to Jamaica and photographing always turns up these ancient worms eating through our shared existence, perching in their chrysalis to render the society dazed and complacent, then being allowed to be reborn as gigantic moths terrorizing the lives of poor people with their high cost of living: market goods, high taxes, high utility cost, IMF stipulations, bad roads, sewage infested roads, expensive ticketing and no oversight for extortion by businessmen and government officials alike.
“Why don’t they say or do something about it I asked,”
“Ghetto people noh have no voice,” was the reply

Advocacy
I believe my birth water was maybe a smorgasbord of corn, mashed up pumpkin with gungu peas, maybe some chicken feet, - protein coating my frail brown skin, everything that I love being pushed out in this thick soup of advocacy. My mother willed my birth but that’s a different story.
I believe I was born in it and of it - a crusader, a missionary, a protector, a patron, a reformer and a pioneer. I got my curiosity and bite from my mother.
I grew up watching her standing beside, behind and in front of her peers and colleagues speaking from a place of “amplifying silenced faces.”
I believe it is here that my eyes were first trained to look at the faces of people as they shuffle and perpetually rearranged the way life uncomfortably hung off their faces like an oversized piece of clothing.
I believe that I always thought this notion of fighting for people as normal - it was like soup on Saturday - it was hearty so it made you sweat, but it was delicious work.
I believe I chose my present vocation because I thought that this was what everyone did.
I use to believe that teachers wanted everyone to learn. Doctors wanted to heal everyone. Engineers wanted to make better buildings, roads and infrastructures, politicians wanted to change the lives of its people and journalists wrote the stories that showed the world the truth.
I believe I became a photographer because I wanted to change the way poor black people were treated and by extension how the world could shift so that the lives of poor people were not disparate from the whole.
I don’t believe this is the world I am living in. I have been wrong about a lot of things - except for the delicious soup my mom always made me on my birthday.