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Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture. In Thomas Ruff, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential photographers working today, Ruff has redefined photography’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as a means for visual experience. He has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital...
Thomas Ruff is among the most important international photographers to emerge in the last fifteen years, and one of the most enigmatic and prolific of Bernd and Hilla Bechers former students, a group that includes Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Axel Hutte. In 2007, Ruff completed his monumental Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. Starting with images he culls primarily from the Web, Ruff enlarges them to a gigantic scale, which exaggerates the pixel patterns until they become sublime geometric displays of color. Many of Ruffs works in the series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, and conversely, scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation. Taken together, these masterworks create an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also actively engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversized volume, Jpegs is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to the publication of Ruffs remarkable series.
Following the huge success of Swimming Pool, Mária returns with a new collection of her photography in a limited edition book.
Thomas Ruff is acknowledged as a leading innovator in the generation of German artists that propelled photography into mainstream art. For more than two decades, he has pushed the limits of the photographic medium, harnessing technologies both old and new. Traditionally, photograms are made by placing objects onto photosensitive paper and exposing the paper to light, thereby recording the silhouettes of the objects. Captivated by this method but seeking to work beyond its limitations, Ruff collaborated with a 3-D imaging expert to design a virtual darkroom that would enable him to experiment with an infinite range of forms.Negatives are a direct result of Ruff’s photogram process; the white and slate-blue images are inverted versions of early-twentieth-century nude studies.
Thomas Ruff is one of the best-known and most influential German photographers working today. This monograph charts Ruff's entire career, including early photographs and works from all his major projects.
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"Thomas Ruff has created a substantial photographic oeuvre, in which he draws our attention to all fields of contemporary life: petit bourgeois homes ... modernist and current architectural arts; the ... faces of our fellow human beings ... outer space; studies of local neighborhoods by night; the news industry's non-stop invention of pictures [photographs from German-language newspapers reproduced and printed by Ruff with no words of explanation in order to find out what information was left when the picture was isolated from its function] ... our bodies; and modifications in perception through the pictorial explosion on the Internet"--Page 7.
Catalogue de l'exposition au Centre national de la photographie, Paris, 1997
Examine the photographic series of celebrated contemporary photographer Thomas Ruff. Thomas Ruff is one of the most important contemporary German photographers living today. Studying under Bernd and Hilla Becher, Ruff experimented with large-format printing. This comprehensive book focuses on his photographic series from the past twenty years. These series are based on found photographs from a variety of sources. The source materials range from early nineteenth century photography to machinemade photographs of distant planets, from post-war press photos to propaganda images from the People's Republic of China, and from Internet pornography to computer generated photograms. In each series, Ruff explores the historical and technical conditions of photography by examining these highly varied pictorial worlds. At the same time, he takes into consideration the afterlife of the images in archives, databases, and on the Internet, thus formulating highly complex perspectives on the photographic medium and the world that has already been photographed.
Ruff's exhibition catalogue Stellar Landscapes focuses specifically on four of his series: the stars series (1989-1992); zycles (2007); the cassini series (2008-2009); and his recent ma.r.s. series. Ruff uses scientific images as the source material for his photographs - many of them freely accessible from the internet. He retouches the images, giving them a new character whose abstract beauty serves as a surface for the imagination. Ruff's work poses questions about mass production of images and contemporary artistic licence.