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Trajectory

Zell am Harmersbach (Alemania), 1958

He was educated at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where, in 1977 under the guidance of Bernd Becher, he joined the new generation of German photographers who, during the 1980s, were to establish a return to a new objectivity in keeping with the times. At the time, Ruff and Höfer were the only students of Bernd Becher employing colour.

This search for reality is precisely what distinguishes his work, which is developed in series with the utilization of repetition as a method of approaching a physical environment that gradually becomes universal. His first project, the series Interiors (1979), initially in black-and-white, gave rise to a new type of photographic document, in which he photographed fragments of the interiors of absolutely ordinary houses. Stemming from a commissioned series of portraits, Ruff took up portraiture, finally settling on a single uniform lighting as well as a single position for the models. It was then, in 1981, when he began his most well-known series Porträts. In 1982, he lived in Paris for six months and produced there a virtually unknown series of self-portraits, L'Empereur.

From 1986 on, he began producing the large format portraits that comprise the distinguishing characteristics of his work and that eventually became the signature style of the new German photography. In his next series Hauser (1987) he maintained the straight documentary style of his portraiture, but applied it to buildings; this work carried on the architectural photography tradition begun at Bauhaus, which he would take up again years later in his work on Mies van der Rohe, I.m.v.d.r (1999). In 1988, Ruff participated in the Aperto of the Venice Biennial, earning significant international recognition with his series Portäts.

Thanks to this recognition and his work's success on the market, Ruff confronted new series such as his constellations Sterne (1989) and his photographic collages based on the archives he compiled from the German press starting in 1981, and entitled Zeitungsfoto (1990). In 1992, he participated in Documenta IX with Nacht, a new series of nocturnal cityscapes inspired by the images broadcast during the Gulf War. This series embodied his first experimentation with new photo-based technologies. In 1995, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennial and presented a new series of portraits, Anderes Porträts, created by way of the superimposition and retouching of his earlier colour portraits, and their eventual conversion into black-and-white.

Ruff's long-standing interest in political affairs was again conveyed in his series Posters (1996). This continual involvement with the era and its most significant events and problems is a constant in his work, in its social and political aspect as well as its purely technical and professional one. Another theme he has always been interested in, and which becomes the subject of a new series, is pornography. In his series Nudes (1999), he reutilised pictures taken from online porn sites. The series was highly criticised, perhaps because it was not considered within the artist's overall aesthetic evolution, its parallelism with his approaches to other subjects and its proximity to abstraction, which was to unfold in Substrat (2001), a reflection on internet imagery. R. O.