Thomas Ruff
Zell am Harmersbach (Germany), 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.

h.e.k 01, 2000
d.p.b 08, 2000

These two photographs belong to the series l.m.v.d.r, begun in 1999 when Julian Heynen commissioned Ruff to photograph the houses designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930 for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseen in Krefeld. The exhibition commemorated the reopening of the architect’s two houses built in Krefeld, the Haus Lange and the Haus Esters, as exhibition spaces. Ruff also included the Haus Tugendhat and the Barcelona Pavillion in this series.
His work method was based on the study of van der Rohe’s architecture itself, of which he was a great admirer, as well as on the existing photographs of the buildings. He therefore decided to establish a view of the buildings as a whole by photographing interiors (living rooms, bathrooms, stairways) and exteriors, thereby creating separate series exploring each of the edifices portrayed. We can surmise the meaning of said sequences -which are quite closely related to the characteristically catalogue-like nature of his work- from the title, a sort of computer search code based on the initials of the buildings and the number corresponding to the digital imaging (h.e.k for Haus Esters Krefeld).
As a result of the Krefeld exhibition, Terence Riley, who was preparing a retrospective exhibition on the architect for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned him to photograph the buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe up to 1938.
The series l.m.v.d.r was expanded upon not due to this new commission alone, but because Ruff employed the already existing photographs of van der Rohe buildings to bestow them with other post production effects and formats. Hence, at the German Pavilion in Barcelona there was an installation presented in the stereoscopic format Ruff had previously utilized in the series Stereofotos (1994), some houses took on the newspaper aesthetic of the series Zeitungsfotos (1990-1991), and he used colour filters –as many as eight in w.h.s- or corrective filters, with which he achieved a blurred view similar to the one in Nudes (1999), as occurred in d.p.b. 08, which has its mirror in the sharp d.p.b. 01. C. D.

Porträt (G. Belz) 1985, 1986

This portrait belongs to the first series Porträts, with which Ruff earned international recognition. He began the series in 1980, experimenting with the various options this genre had to offer, until he finally settled on mid-bust portraits and frontal lighting. In this first series, he chose a neutral coloured backdrop, which he replaced with a white one in his next series of portraits, begun in 1986. That same year he decided to enlarge the format of the portraits considerably, a groundbreaking proposal in fine art photography at the time.
This work was criticized for representing a select panorama of German youth, to which he responded with blaue Augen (1991), digitally modifying the subjects’ eyes, rendering them blue.
With this gallery of portraits of friends and acquaintances wearing calm expressions, Ruff paradoxically managed to address anonymity with individuality. To this end, he worked from the idea that photography can portray only the superficial, whereby he was able to extract it from the person portrayed. Despite following the idea of a catalogue of characters, initiated by August Sander, Ruff overlooked the personality of the subjects, omitting any references other than that of their belonging to a specific generation and a specific place. C. D.

Haus Nr. 11 II, 1989

Continuing with the idea of photography as portrait of the superficial, and taking advantage of his experience with the portrait series, Ruff simultaneously began –in 1987- to photograph buildings, thus revisiting the scenes he had already contemplated in his first project Interiors (1979-1983).
In a homage to his mentor Bernd Becher, the buildings portrayed are those that caught his eye during his daily trip to and from his studio, in the vicinity of Düsseldorf, between 1950 and 1970. The photographs were made early in the morning from January to March, which resulted in that neutral grey background so frequent in Northern Europe, and which enveloped all the images with sober uniformity.
These buildings are extremely functional, even banal; facades that do not allow any further perception, distant as in postcards, where specific indications of place and time are eliminated. Ruff therefore conveyed an objective visual experience which is not at all disturbing, yet depicts a most sobering reality. This was the first series in which he used digital imaging to alter some photographs, to eliminate signs and trees, because, as he put it “reality did not fulfil my wishes”. C. D.