Words | Lindsay Heiman
Migration Patterns: Photographer & Visual Artist Brandon Ruffin’s Capturing the South Without Photographing It
Photographer Brandon Ruffin made a book about the American South without taking a single picture in the South.
The decision wasn’t meant to be provocative. It came from the way he’d always experienced the South himself. Raised between California and Louisiana, he grew up watching the two places blur into each other. Family history, neighborhoods, language, and tradition kept overlapping until the distinction between where something began and where it ended became harder to pin down.
That idea became Migration Patterns, his debut monograph from Setanta Books. Every photograph was made in the Bay Area, where Ruffin’s family eventually settled after leaving Louisiana, yet the South runs through the book from beginning to end.
Migration Patterns Cover
The cover doesn’t announce any of that. A towering tree stretches across a quiet Oakland street, its branches reaching over modest homes in the afternoon light. It looks like the kind of neighborhood you cruise through without thinking twice. What the…
