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. 

Daido Moriyama

One for Benjamin. I guess they have lighthouses in Japan, too.

Robin Rhode

Untitled, Harvest, 2005.

Wheel of Steel, 2006.

Table of Contents, 2006.

Snake Eyes, 2004.

        All images by South African photographer, Robin Rhode.

  See more of his work here.

Marco Breuer & Anna Atkins

         Cyanotype, 1843. Anna Atkins.

Untitled, 1997. Marco Breuer.

  Silver gelatin paper burned.

I've never been attracted to abstract photography, but when I saw these works by Marco Breuer in person, I was an instant convert. In these works, Breuer references the indexical nature of the photographic medium first realized by early photographic explorations by Anna Atkins in the 1800s. Atkins's cyanotypes engage in post-enlightenment scientific inquiry at a time when the photographic medium was in its infancy. Over 100 years later, Breuer works in what I would call a post-photographic digital age in which technological advances have long since entombed the physicality of the medium. Although I am not usually a proponent of Greenbergian notions of pure artistic formality, Breuer's work presents a convincing argument that on occasion, pure explorations of medium and form can yield sublime results. 

You can see more of Breuer's work on the Von Lintel Gallery website.

Annika von Hausswolff

  A Given Moment in the History of Coming into Being, 2002

 By Annika von Hausswolff. You can see more of her work here.

Thomas Ruff's Students

The photographs below are by students of Thomas Ruff in Düsseldorf. Click here for a link to the class website with all of the student portfolios.

By Juergen Staak

By Stephanie Purschler

By Hye-Mi Kim

By Hye-Mi Kim

E.J. Bellocq, Nan Goldin, & Ryan McGinley : Sexuality in photography from 1908-2008

Above image by Nan Goldin. (1981)

Anyone aware of the current Ryan McGinley/Tiny Vices inspired trend in snapshot-style photography of youth culture should note its precedent: Nan Goldin's raw and emotional 1986 Aperture monologue, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.  Below is one of McGinley's most famous photographs, an example of McGinley's more light-hearted 21st-century version of Goldin's Ballad.

Ryan McGinley.  Dakota (Hair), 2004.

In light of this, I thought it might be interesting to look at what came before Nan Goldin. I found an essay by Nan Goldin on the work of E.J. Bellocq, who photographed in the Storyville whorehouses in New Orleans in the early 20th century. The essay was published in Art Forum in 1997. If you would like to read the essay, you can find it here. 

 

Below image by E.J. Bellocq

 If Foucault had been an art theorist, I think he might have been interested.