christina ruiz

I’m a NYC- and Chicago-based portrait photographer with an appetite for travel, meticulously hand-crafted costumes, and all of the salty, savory dishes the world has to offer me.

Some of my earliest memories are of setting up photoshoots in my parents’ basement with my best friend, Maggie. It didn’t matter if we didn’t have photo-worthy outfits (pajamas) or interesting props (an umbrella) or flattering poses (me, holding my foot near my face). The photos didn’t go anywhere (this was pre-myspace), but it didn’t matter; we just wanted to do the thing.

My freshman year of high school, I felt an unwarranted sense of superiority as I was approved to take the film photography class that was restricted to sophomores and older, but I quickly became frustrated with being limited to taking photos of hubcaps and flagpoles. I took photos of my friends in the hallways at school and behind the scenes at play practice and spent hours in the darkroom after school developing my photos. I upgraded my digital point-and-shoot and brought it everywhere, starting a gallery-based blog (The Cobrasnake-style (I even emailed Mark Hunter to ask about his workflow and preferred platform)) full of photos that nobody except my friends cared about.

I was already an avid journal-writer, but it felt extremely important to me to document every moment to double down and make sure that I remembered everything and everyone, just as they were at that time. I saved up, and near the end of high school, I purchased my first giant, heavy DSLR, sealing my fate with photography with that first real financial investment. I felt like such a pro.

In college, I joined a campus magazine as a photographer, which was my first real step outside of the comfort zone of taking photos of my friends. I shot concerts, protests, and other campus happenings, and I got better at shooting potion and practiced providing context through my photos.

When my sister got engaged, I asked her if she and her fiancé wanted to do an engagement shoot with me. We walked around Lincoln Park Zoo, and I learned two things: I loved shooting couples, and I was terrible at directing.

To practice shooting and directing couples, I reached out to some friends and asked them to do some mock-engagement shoots with me. It was clunky and goofy, but we always had such a good time together. I wasn’t super close with any of the couples I shot with to begin with, but I felt like we knew each other so well once we were done. The first couple I had a practice session with got engaged soon after our shoot, and they asked me to shoot their wedding for them.

The whole day was a rush, and I was so nervous that I felt like my stomach was going to fall out of my body, but I was so proud of what we had made together that day. I still feel all three of these things before and after each shoot.