Fine Art Photographs at Auction: Thomas Ruff - Brief Biography & Book List

Brief Bio
Thomas Ruff, born 1958, is a German photographer living and working in Düsseldorf, Germany. He graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the late 1970s, studying photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher. He would later teach there, in the same position his teachers held, from 2000 to 2005. He works in series of photographs, focusing for a time on a central theme. One of his first series was "Portraits," extremely large format portraiture of his friends taken against solid color backgrounds. In another series, "Night," he uses a night vision camera to take photographs of buildings in Düsseldorf. This series was partially in reaction to images broadcast from the First Gulf War.

Although Ruff does take his own photographs, as in the examples above, he also uses the photographs of others and digitally alters them for his own purposes of expression. Examples include selecting and enlarging newspaper photographs after removing the captions, the series "Stars," where he digitally altered astronomical photos, "Machines," where he recolored black and white negatives of industrial equipment, "Nudes," where he blurred and altered Internet pornography, and more recently "jpeg," a series based on altering various JPEG images widely available on the internet following the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack in America.

Ruff's investigations are often as much - if not in fact more - about the nature of photographs and imagery than the content of the images themselves. Ruff explains his intentions in some detail in an excellent 1993 interview with Philip Pocock in the Journal of Contemporary Art. A more recent 2005 interview in The Brooklyn Rail is also quite informative, and covers many more of his series. Popphoto.com published a brief interview with Ruff in 2008.

The Tate magazine featured an article on Thomas Ruff in their 5th issue. The Guggenheim has a brief biography on their website, as does the Goethe Institute (put up following their display of Ruff's series "Machines.") A gallery in NY representing Ruff has several examples of Ruff's work, including a selection from many of his different series.

Books