Oakland photographer captures the faces of Oakland

Over the past several months on his Instagram page @ruffdraft, Brandon Ruffin has featured a series of powerful and personal portraits of the African American community in Oakland. Over the past several months on his Instagram page @ruffdraft, Brandon Ruffin has featured a series of powerful and personal portraits of the African American community in Oakland. Photo: Courtesy Brandon Ruffin Photo: Courtesy Brandon Ruffin Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Oakland photographer captures the faces of Oakland 1 / 18 Back to Gallery

Oakland based photographer Brandon Ruffin wants his photographs to capture people in their most real form.

"I hope that the photos convey the beauty in all of us," he recently told the SFGATE in an interview.

Over the past several months on his Instagram page @ruffdraft, Ruffin has featured a series of compelling and personal portraits. Many of them focus on the African-American community in Oakland.

"During my journey with photography I thought about the power in controlling narratives and how communities of color have traditionally had so little control of their own narratives and stories about their own communities," he said. "I began to focus on portraits inside those communities to show the diversity inside those communities as well as providing an authentic narrative."

Inspired by the work of photographers Gordon Parks, Eli Reed, Saul Leiter, and Diane Arbus among others, Ruffin intends for each of his portraits to open up a conversation between the subject and the viewer.

"I became obsessed with implied stories," explained Ruffin. "I loved going out and shooting a scene in front of me...sort of capturing a moment in a bigger story. I loved the idea of taking a photo and knowing that there could be an infinite amount of interpretations and stories that the viewer could come up [with]."

A San Francisco native, Ruffin grew up in Richmond before moving to Los Angeles for several years. He returned to the Bay Area ten years ago, living in Oakland. His first experimentation with art was doing graffiti as a teenager. His family gave him a point and shoot camera when he was in college and his passion for photography grew from there.

Ruffin often finds his photography subjects while taking street photographs in "The Town." After he identifies a person he wants to photograph, he will often spend several minutes talking with them before making their image.

"There is so much beauty, so much pain, passion, love, tragedy so much of who we are that is captured in a portrait," he noted.

Asked what he hopes to achieve through his photographs, Ruff responded: "I hope that my work can connect people of all backgrounds. Perhaps even inspire and encourage authentic human (in-person) interactions. I think that we are all very unique and that all of our stories are important and add to the story as us as human beings in this very moment in time and in history."

"On a personal level, I hope that my work inspires young photographers from communities like mine to seek out and find the beauty in their neighborhoods," he added, "learn to have pride in their particular struggles and hardships and use the camera as a tool of expression to empower themselves."

You can find more of Ruffin's photography on his Instagram page @ruffdraft, his website ruffdraftvisuals.com, and his VSCO photo journal under his name Brandon Ruffin (Ruffdraft).