“I make investigations that ask people to become aware of what they are looking at.�
Experimenting with photography
Thomas Ruff
“Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.”
Born in 1958, Thomas Ruff is a photographer from Germany. He lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 1974, Ruff got his first camera and he began experimenting photographic techniques after his classes about the basics of this art. He gained influence from magazines of photography and took similar pictures as practice assignments for himself. Thomas Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy). Ruff names Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Karl Bloßfeld, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston as his main influences. From 2000 to 2005 Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (the previous “Becher-Class”). During his studies in Düsseldorf, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography. His initial main topic was the interior of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s (room portraits and design details). This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances. These are typically shown with emotionless expressions, in very large, passport-style portraits of great detail and high resolution. In a discussion with Philip Pocock (Journal for Contemporary Art, 1993), Ruff mentions a connection between these portraits and the police observation methods in Germany in the 1970s during the German autumn.
These series were followed in 1989 by images of the night sky, which were not based on photographs by Ruff. In the years from 1992 to 1995, Ruff produced night images (of exteriors and buildings), with a night vision device, which apparently was deliberately used in analogy to military and espionage applications. In 1994 to 1996 these were followed by Stereoscopy images. A further series in the 1990s consists of “Newspaper Images”; here Ruff again utilized others’ pictures in a similar fashion to his night sky images. He used newspaper clippings enlarged without their original subtitles.
Biennale, Italy in 1995, Museum Haus Lange, Frankfurt, Germany in 2000,Chabot Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands and Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany in 2001,Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; Städtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany and Artium Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Vitoria (Gasteiz), Spain in 2002,Casa de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal and Tate Liverpool, Great Britai in 2003.
In 2003 Thomas Ruff published a photographic collection of “Nudes” with a text by the French author Michel Houellebecq. Ruff’s images here are based on Internet pornography, which was digitally processed and obscured. This series was received very ambivalently. Throughout ruff’s career he has had exhibitions around the world. His exhibitions include Schloss Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany and Porticus Frankfurt, Germany in 1998, documenta IX, Kassel, Germany in 1992, Venice
Thomas Ruff’s building portraits are likewise serial and reclusive, and have been edited digitally to remove obstructing details — a typifying method, which gives the images an exemplary character (Ruff: “This type of building represents more or less the ideology and economy in the West German republic in the past thirty years”). The photographic method was also standardized, regarding light, perspective and location.
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In a wide range of photographic series, Ruff has moved from straight photography in the 1980s to employing found images in the ‘90s and, more recently, 3D imagery. Ruff first gain notice as his photographer for his interior series. In this series Ruff captured images of abandonment German buildings and showed them has gigantic current or prints starting in the 1980s. Rather than use the typical black-and-white style that characterized the documentary photography of the time, Ruff chose vivid color to highlight the beauty in destroyed surroundings. Ruff began this series in 1979, it is still a ongoing project. In 1981 through 1985 Ruff worked on his portrait series where he took passport like images, with the upper edge of the photographs situated just above the hair with even lighting. The subjects were between 25 and 35 years old, taken with a 9 x 12 cm negative. The early portraits or black and white and small, soon Ruff switched to using color with solid backgrounds; selected from a stack of colored stock that would serve as a background. The resulting portraits depict individual persons often Ruff’s students framed as a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face on or in profile, and in front of a plain background. Ruff began to experiment with large format printing in 1986 ultimately producing portraits up to 7 x 5’ in size. In the 1990s, Ruff increasingly turned to repurposing images found from countless pictures on the Internet. For Ruff’s nudes series, Ruff found pornographic images on the Internet and distorted them until they were only vaguely recognized. The board were fuzzy images look to be caught in motion, slightly abstracted becoming more than the act of looking at the content of the illicit images. Ruff has made multiple series that deal with outer space. For Ruff’s “Sterne” (1989 through 1992) takes telescope photographs and stars from the European Southern Observatory. Ruff turns them into mere white dots against a black background.
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“Most of the photos we come across today aren’t really authentic anymore they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.’
Ruff’s “cassini” (2008 through 2009) used interplanetary images from NASA’s website, bowling of these images of planets into massive sizes so that the original message is completely lost. In the series “ma.r.s.” (2010), Ruff took the images of the surface of Mars that were originally black and white then Ruff rendered the images in color. In Ruff’s “Zycles” series he used algorithms to create computer-generated abstractions of magnetic fields. The resulting loops and lines vaguely suggests there highly for her origins. In Ruff’s most recent work uses pictograms. The pictogram series depicts abstract shapes, lines, and spirals in seemingly random formations with varying degrees of transparency and luminosity. Both the objects and the lights in Ruff’s pictograms derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program. Ruff has exhibited widely since the show at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich, in 1981. Ruff has taken part in numerous exhibitions including the 1988 Schloss Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany, the 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy, the 2003 Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan, South Korea, and the 2011 Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
Project Description The purpose of this assignment is to use the leading grid you will design a feature article on a chosen photographer. Typographic grids control the visual organization of the page by supplying a particular kind of structure development for typographic organization. The structure is made up of margins, alleys, grid fields, and intersection points. There is allow the designer to create groups of typographic information that allows the viewer to proceed through a complex page environment, and tracking information in a seamless and linear manner. A good grid forces order into the layout so it acts as a ordaining device enabling the reader to know where to look for information and understand its relative importance. Just as important is that the grid works on a aesthetic level. The reader might not be aware of it, but subliminally they pick up on the fact that everything is well ordered and in its place. If a picture fits functionally into the call next to something it seems to be slightly amiss, but if the lines of the text align neatly across the Collins on a page from fundamental and reassuring logic seems to be at work. The goals of this project were to understand and construct a leading grid, how to use clear hierarchy, and using typographic rules and details to create a dynamic composition.
Colophon New Generation photography designed by Joey Weber Printed at Jayhawk Ink on Fonts used Gotham, Adobe Caslon Pro Resources: www.artnet.com/artists/thomas-ruff/ gagosian.com/artists/thomas-ruff http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/close_look/thomas_ruff_close_look-51330 http://aperture.org/blog/thomas-ruff-photograms-for-the-new-age/