Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff.  "jpeg sak01" (2005) from the series JPEGS.

(These images are pixelated on purpose by Ruff)

Thomas Ruff.  "jpeg se02" (2004) from the series JPEGS.

Thomas Ruff. From Portraits series (1981-85).

        Thomas Ruff gained significant notoriety as part of the Düsseldorf school of photograph, where he studied with Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer under Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ruff’s early work was centered on large-scale portraits of his Düsseldorf classmates. He photographed his subjects in a clinical deadpan style, asking them to avoid facial expressions. These emotionless portraits intentionally lack background information and narrative cues, suggesting that no real truth about the subject can be learned from the photograph aside from the subtle facial attributes that point to the reaction of the subject to the camera and to the photographer (2). Even in this early work, Ruff’s interest in the ontological status of the photograph was evident. 

        In Ruff’s more recent work, he has abandoned portraiture, but his sharp awareness of the photographic medium continues to inform the theoretical framework that motivates his images. Ruff now turns his attention towards appropriated imagery from the Internet. For Ruff, the Benjaminian aura, tied to the object-ness of a work of art, has long since been buried in the annals of art history and replaced by artwork defined by its absolute resistance to physical presence. For his series, JPEGS, Ruff downloads images from the internet and then blows them up and pixelates them beyond their original density, so as to indicate their removal from the "original." These images are so far removed from physical reality and so entangled in notions of reproduction and appropriation that a new kind of sublime aura emerges that is based on the non-existence of the work of art. The work of art, for Ruff, is a phantom of passing ideas and representations of representations. Its physicality is no longer connected to any single point in space or time, but exists within a floating network of reproductions. The work of art exists only within the plurality of its own being.