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Sunday 16 February

Thomas Ruff: The Image Demystifier

Published on: 16 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

Thomas Ruff’s digital photograms transcend the conventional boundaries of photography. By generating computer-created images without a camera, he produces abstract works that hover between painting and photography, challenging the very essence of imagery in the digital age.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, Thomas Ruff (born in 1958) is not merely that German photographer who enlarges his images to the scale of a Berlin skyscraper. No, he is a formidable theorist of the image who, under the guise of a meticulous engineer, dissects the very foundations of contemporary photography with the precision of a neurosurgeon. In his Düsseldorf studio, a former power station shared with Andreas Gursky, he methodically orchestrates the systematic destruction of our visual certainties.

This critique will focus on two fundamental aspects of his work: first, his radical deconstruction of portraiture and architecture through his iconic series, and second, his uncompromising exploration of the limits of digital imagery. This approach will allow us to understand how this artist constantly reinvents our relationship with photography.

Let us begin with his celebrated monumental portraits from the 1980s, those faces of young Germans frozen in chilling neutrality, magnified to a scale that defies all intimacy. These works are not mere oversized identity photographs, as some shortsighted critics might suggest. No, these portraits are a masterful slap to our naive belief in photographic objectivity. Ruff forces us to view his subjects as laboratory specimens, voluntary guinea pigs in his grand experiment on photographic truth.

The faces, stripped of any expression, gaze at us with an intensity that directly evokes Jacques Lacan’s theories on the gaze as an object of desire and anxiety. Each portrait becomes a mirror in which we contemplate our own dehumanization in the age of widespread surveillance. The extreme standardization of these portraits recalls August Sander’s work on German society in the 1920s, but Ruff pushes the concept to its breaking point. Where Sander sought to catalog the social types of his era, Ruff deliberately strips his subjects of any sociological dimension.

His portraits are empty shells, soulless masks that reflect our own emptiness. This approach echoes Roland Barthes’ reflections on the death of the subject in photography, but Ruff goes even further: he deliberately assassinates the subjectivity of his models to confront us with a disturbing truth about our time. This series eerily anticipates our social media era, where everyone stages themselves in calculated neutrality, desperately trying to control their public image.

Ruff’s subjects, with their direct gaze and neutral expression, already seem trapped in this dictatorship of appearance that we experience today. The artist understood, long before the advent of Facebook and Instagram, that we were becoming obsessive archivists of our own emptiness. This prophetic dimension of his work is particularly striking when we consider that these portraits were created in the 1980s, well before the digital age.

An often overlooked aspect of this series is its implicit political dimension. In 1980s Germany, still marked by widespread surveillance during the RAF (Red Army Faction) period, these standardized portraits resonate as a subtle critique of social control mechanisms. Ruff transforms the traditional format of the identity photograph, the quintessential symbol of state control, into a monument to bureaucratic dehumanization.

His “Häuser” (Houses) series (1987–1991) extends this reflection by addressing architecture. These photographs of anonymous Düsseldorf buildings, digitally cleaned of any distracting elements, push to the absurd the legacy of his mentors, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Where the Bechers sought to document the disappearance of industrial heritage, Ruff creates images of such perfect banality that they become unsettling. These smooth, impersonal facades are architectural portraits of a society that has lost all sense of individuality.

The digital manipulation used here to “clean” the images of any extraneous detail already signals the radical shift his work would take in subsequent years. These buildings, isolated from their urban context, become geometric abstractions that evoke Bauhaus architectural theories, but devoid of their social utopianism. Ruff shows us architecture reduced to its simplest expression, an architecture that is nothing more than façade, surface without depth.

This first phase of his work, centered on portraits and architecture, lays the foundation of his methodology: a systematic approach aimed at revealing the mechanisms of photographic image construction. But this is only the beginning of his deconstructive enterprise.

The second phase of his work marks a decisive turning point with the advent of the digital age. His “jpegs” series, begun after the September 11, 2001, attacks, is arguably his most radical work. By appropriating news images found online and enlarging them until their pixelated structure becomes visible, he transforms media icons into striking digital abstractions. The collapsing World Trade Center towers, natural disasters, armed conflicts—all become abstract motifs, geometric patterns, pure surfaces.

This series echoes Jean Baudrillard’s theories on hyperreality, where the proliferation of images ultimately erases the reality they claim to represent. The “jpegs” confront us with a disturbing truth: in our image-saturated world, we no longer look at reality but at its digital compression, its reduction to binary data. The paradoxical beauty of these pixelated images is a mere illusion that makes us forget their original violence.

His “Sterne” (Stars) series continues this reflection on photographic objectivity by appropriating astronomical images taken by professional telescopes. These photographs of the night sky, of a glacial beauty, are in reality complex constructions, data visualizations more than traditional images. The artist reminds us that even science, with its claims to absolute objectivity, cannot escape the mediation of the human gaze.

The images in “Sterne” take us back to the very origins of photography, when the first daguerreotypes tried to capture the light of stars. But Ruff reverses the process: instead of photographing the sky, he appropriates already existing images, produced by machines for other machines. In doing so, he questions our contemporary relationship to scientific imagery, where data visualization gradually replaces direct observation.

In his “Nacht” (Night) series, created during the Gulf War, Ruff uses night vision technology to photograph deserted urban landscapes. These ghostly green images evoke televised war coverage but are actually meticulously staged compositions. The artist repurposes a military surveillance tool to create images that question our morbid fascination with the aesthetics of war.

The “Nudes” series, begun in the 1990s, perhaps represents the pinnacle of his art of deconstruction. By appropriating pornographic images found online, which he blurs and digitally reworks, Ruff transforms the rawest genre into quasi-painterly compositions. These disturbing images, midway between Gerhard Richter and a pixelated pornographic website, challenge our ambiguous relationship with eroticism in the digital age.

Ruff’s digital photograms push this exploration of photographic limits even further. By creating images without a camera, generated entirely by computer, he questions the very nature of photography in the digital age. These abstract works, floating between painting and photography, result from complex mathematical manipulation that has nothing to do with traditional light capture on a sensitive surface.

His “ma.r.s.” series, based on NASA images of Mars, extends this reflection on the nature of scientific imagery. By recoloring and reworking these visual data, Ruff creates surreal Martian landscapes that challenge our relationship to space exploration. These images remind us that even our most objective visions of the universe are cultural constructions, interpretations shaped by our technological tools and aesthetic assumptions.

Ruff’s recent works, notably his “press++” series, where he overlays the front and back of archival press photographs, continue to explore the limits of our visual credulity. By revealing the annotations, stamps, and manipulations behind press images, he exposes the mechanisms through which the media construct our collective memory.

Ruff’s body of work constitutes a vast deconstruction of our visual certainties, carried out with the implacable rigor of a scientist and the intuition of a visionary artist. By systematically exposing the mechanisms of image production and manipulation, he forces us to confront a disturbing truth: photography has never been objective, it has never been a “mirror of reality”.

The ultimate irony of his work may lie in the fact that his images, despite their clinical coldness, end up being strangely beautiful. A mathematical, calculated beauty, as cold as an equation but just as precise. Ruff shows us that even in our hyperconnected and overexposed world, beauty can emerge from the systematic deconstruction of our visual certainties.

Reference(s)

Thomas RUFF (1958)
First name: Thomas
Last name: RUFF
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • Germany

Age: 67 years old (2025)

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