I Am a Stranger in This Country – Frederik Rüegger

My work centres around the profound and intricate tapestry of human culture. 

Artist : Frederik Rüegger

Series : I Am a Stranger in This Country

Website / Instagram

Each photograph I take is a fragment of a larger reality, one that seeks to capture and convey the essence of communities, traditions and the subtle interplay of history and modernity.

Words by Gerry Badger :

Travellers still maintain their horse fairs, although fewer still travel in horse-drawn caravans. But perhaps paradoxically in this increasingly technology-obsessed culture, horse ownership in the Traveller and Roma communities appears to be on the increase after a decline over recent decades, and these events are not only where they meet together to show off their horses and trade them, they are also valuable ‘optics’ in projecting a positive public face.

Frederik Rüegger photographed seven horse fairs in all over two years – Kent, Stow, Dagenham and Appleby in England, Smithfield and Ballinasloe in Ireland, and St Boswells in Scotland. The most widely known of these is probably Appleby Horse Fair, held in Appleby- in-Westmorland in Cumbria in early June. It is certainly billed as the largest, and probably the one to have attracted the most British documentary photographers. It attracts around ten thousand Travellers and Roma participants, about one thousand traditional horse-drawn caravans, and some thirty thousand visitors. While horses are traded and displayed, there is a plethora of other activities – fortune-telling, palm-reading, music, and the trading of both general and horse-related merchandise.

The general ambience at horse fairs tends to be more informal than other communal events. This makes them not only relaxed but especially joyous occasions, and therefore a magnet for the photographer of a ‘street photography’ persuasion, who, like Frederik Rüegger, are in search of candid images of people. This is a genre that – for photographers with cameras rather than mobile phones – has become more difficult in these media savvy, and media suspicious, times. Events such as horse fairs are crowded, and sneaky photographers are not so noticed or conspicuous while all the attendees are busy snapping each other with their own photographic hardware.

I have used the word ‘sneaky’ because candid photography is by definition sneaky, at least in execution if not necessarily in intent. As Rüegger says: ‘When l shoot I like to be invisible most of the time. I want the moment to be the most natural’. This is the classic dictum of the street photographer, who wants to maintain 100 per cent control over the picture. Rüegger describes himself as a documentary photographer, but the issue of control would rather merit the term ‘in the documentary mode’. He is interested in the complex reality in front of his lens of course, but also in the business of making pictures, creating images that in themselves beguile and intrigue in an aesthetic as well as contextual sense.

© Frederik Rüegger – All rights reserved