RUIZ, STEFAN
Passion Project: Stefan Ruiz has spent years of photographing Televisa Studios, where many Mexican telenovelas, or soap operas, are filmed. (Telenovelas air in over 50 countries worldwide.) His book, The Factory of Dreams, offers an intimate glimpse of that world. (Time 20120601)
In his book 'The Factory of Dreams,' photographer Stefan Ruiz goes inside the Mexico City television studio where many of the country's cultishly popular telenovelas are filmed. Since 2003, Ruiz has spent time on set, documenting the classic archetypes--young lovers, the kindly partiarch, the long-suffering maid--and the actors who have populated such sappy soap operas as 'Loving You Is My Sin' and 'The Rich Also Cry.' While the shows' devout fans have a hard time parsing fact from fiction, Ruiz deftly expands the frame to give us a crew's-eye view of the proceedings: gaffers' ladders lean against half-built sets, a chandelier hangs amid production lights, actors loll about between takes. Such workaday details, Ruiz implies, are the stuff these dreams are built on. (Maura Egan W Magazine 20120524)
Welcome to the world of the telenovela, where love is found, lost, and found again. In the new book "Factory of Dreams," from Aperture, photographer Stefan Ruiz takes his camera behind the scenes at Televisa Studios (Televisa is the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the world) in Mexico City and introduces us to actors and actresses, giving us a close-up view of the meticulous sets, costumes and lighting that create cross-sections of Mexican society. (Rebecca Horne Wall Street Journal )
