Published by Walther König, Köln. Text by Dieter Roelstraete.
In the early 2000s, Thomas Ruff (born 1958) chanced across a coffee-table propaganda book on Mao Zedong and became interested in the visual rhetoric of Chinese Communism, eventually purchasing copies of La Chine—the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced from the late 1950s through the 1970s as a means of demonstrating the advantages of Communism to European countries. Ruff scanned images from La Chine depicting cheerful soldiers, scenic views, ceremonial occasions and Mao himself, enlarging them to reveal the offset halftone dots, then duplicating the image and converting it into pixels; that image was then layered over the original scan, from which Ruff removed various areas. The final image therefore contains both analog halftone and digital pixel. As Susanne Holschbach observes, “Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane.”
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Martin Germann. Text by Thomas Bernhard.
This publication presents the Interiors series created by Thomas Ruff (born 1958) as a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Most of the pictures, which are simultaneously sentimental and sardonic, were taken in the petite-bourgeois apartments of family and friends in the Black Forest region.
Published by Whitechapel Gallery. Edited by Iwona Blazwick.
One of the greatest artists to use photography in the 21st century, Ruff came of age in the 1980s alongside Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, in what was to become known as the Düsseldorf School.
Creating photographic images on the scale of history painting but with a cool hyperrealism, Ruff moves from the micro to the macro, from portraying friends to picturing the cosmos. He also oscillates between the laboratory and the archive, experimenting with digital technologies to create photograms with virtual objects and rescuing discarded press photographs to reveal lost histories.
This substantial Ruff overview accompanies a major retrospective survey at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and contains all of his most renowned series, including portraits, disasters, sky and cityscapes, internet nudes, photograms, manga images, magnetically generated images and found press photographs.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Jörg Schellmann. Introduction by Thomas Weski.
The numerous photographic series of Thomas Ruff (born 1958) are consistently compelling. In larger-than-life-sized portraits we encounter the intent gazes of young adults. Sterile building façades serve as a commentary on the misery of urban sprawl. Pixelated nudes from pornographic websites render important details almost indecipherable while underscoring the power of these images. In exhibitions the photographer shows large-scale prints, which are produced in a very limited number. However, he consistently produces small-format photographic prints using a range of reproductive techniques, which are usually produced in editions of 30 or more to make them affordable for a broader art audience. This catalogue raisonné of editions was prepared by Jörg Schellmann in close cooperation with Thomas Ruff and is based on the most up-to-date research. The works are organized chronologically—not according to the year the image was created but its year of production. The volume presents all signed and numbered editions by the artist from 1988 onward.
In his numerous acclaimed photo series, such as Portraits, Nudes, Jpegs and m.a.r.s., Thomas Ruff (born 1958) has brilliantly challenged the medium of photography itself. This 50-minute documentary (in German with English subtitles), made over three years, portrays the artist in his studio and creating an exhibition.
Published by La Fábrica. Text by José Manuel Costa. Interview by Valeria Liebermann.
Over the past few decades, Thomas Ruff (born 1958) has explored new technologies in photography to interrogate how images are read in the age of spectacle and media dissemination. Among the most prolific members of the Düsseldorf School, Ruff effectively set aside conventional photography in 1989 to work with altered and appropriated imagery, using military technology, astrophysics and digital reproduction to explore and define the limits of contemporary image-making. The images in his Nacht series, for example, were taken using night-vision infrared technology developed for the Gulf War. Over the last two decades, Ruff has sourced material from an array of sources, from newspapers to Japanese manga comics and the internet. Thomas Ruff: Series collects 59 images from seven of Ruff’s best-known series. Alongside the Nacht series and the photograms, it includes his series m.a.r.s.,zycles and cassini, which use 3-D renderings of mathematical curves and enlarged images from NASA satellites.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Text by Jochen Ludwig, Christiane Grathwohl-Scheffel.
German photographer Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is closely associated with the city of Düsseldorf though his studentship under Bernd and Hilla Becher, but he actually hails from the small town of Zell am Harmersbach, in the Black Forest. Ruff's Interior series, made during his student days (prior to the Bechers) between 1979 and 1983, is located there. Taken in the homes of his family and friends, and photographed in sober black and white, it draws the viewer immediately into the atmosphere of 1960s and 1970s Germany, showing the farmhouse in which Ruff's mother grew up, along with its barn, toolshed and silo, a young bull and nearby woodland paths. When Ruff undertook his long-term Jpegs project, imagery of the Black Forest cropped up again. All of Ruff's Black Forest-related series are collected in this catalogue, along with two other series, Stars and Nudes.
Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst. Edited by Gerald Matt. Text by Catherine Hug, Douglas Fogle, Kurt W. Forster, Gerald Matt. Interview by Gerald Matt with Thomas Ruff.
Surfaces, Depths is a representative selection of Thomas Ruff's works, over a period that already spans about 25 years, with projects ranging from portraits and interiors to telescope and space probe pictures and "nightsight" photography. Ruff incorporates an extremely wide range of everyday subjects into his experiments--people, architecture, planets, the Internet--and subjects them to all forms of camera technology, so that his work often seems to embody the history of the art as it develops. Ruff has a particular fascination with photographic techniques that appear to erase or leave out the artist's hand, techniques often designed for military or scientific purposes. In a recent series titled Zycles, for example, Ruff constructs his images with the help of mathematical formulas and computer technology, twisting two-dimensional surfaces into the three-dimensional space of vector graphics. Surfaces and Depths focuses on ten of Ruff's total of 18 projects to address this particular ongoing preoccupation with artistic detachment, and the polarities of surface and depth vision in the construction of images. In doing so, it makes the broadest assessment to date of the oeuvre of this tireless innovator.
How much visual information is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of speedy comprehension. In the Jpegs series, German photographer Thomas Ruff exploits this imprecision in digital technology, locating online jpegs and enlarging them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction. A closer look at these images reveals that, in addition to the degeneration of the image into a digital grid, the color and brightness generated by the algorithms of the compression also become visible. Many of Ruff's works in this series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, or conversely, on scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation--subjects ill suited to disruptive pixelation, and therefore perfect for Ruff's purposes. Taken together, these images constitute an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversize volume, Jpegs is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to this monumental series.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 11.25 x 15 in. / 132 pgs / 65 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 5/31/2009 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597110938TRADE List Price: $85.00 CAD $100.00
Published by Charta. Edited by Fabrizio Tramontano. Essays by Giovanni Leoni, Giancarlo Cosenza and Luigi Cosenza. Introduction Giancarlo Cosenza.
Shortly after graduating in Bridge and Road Engineering in 1929 and being appointed to the rank of reserve lieutenant, I took a look around my city. There were no patterns to follow--only examples to imitate. The grand extravagant projects were the monopoly of the regime of arrogance and favoritism. A modern fish market was needed to replace the grubby pietra del pesce" on Via Marina. I studied the problem on the spot and visited various other fish markets in Pozzuoli, Milan, Venice, Marseilles, Ostend, Hamburg." This is how Luigi Cosenza (Naples, 1905-1984) describes the genesis of his first project, the Mercato del pesce di Napoli (Fish Market of Naples), built in 1929 and considered the manifesto of the city's rational architecture. This book documents the "M.D.P.N." building in equally rational and elegant images from Germany's renowned Thomas Ruff, beginning with photographs taken in the dazzling light of an early afternoon in September 2002.
PUBLISHER Charta
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.75 x 9.5 in. / 72 pgs / 33 color / 6 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 1/1/2006 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2006 p. 83
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788881585588TRADE List Price: $34.95 CAD $40.00
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essays by Caroline Flosdorff and Michael Stüber.
Arguably the most versatile artist of the Dsseldorf School, Thomas Ruff reinvents himself as an artist, both conceptually and aesthetically, with each new body of work. From architectural photography to portraits, from aerial views and cityscapes to color abstractions and internet-derived nudes, Ruff constantly challenges the given meanings of photography. This book presents for the first time his most recent body of work, the so-called "Machine" pictures. In this series, Ruff borrows from the picture archive of a Dsseldorf machine factory, where he discovered glass negatives that had been used for commercial brochures. The artist scanned the negatives and then proceeded to digitally alter their color and size. By freeing these images from their original context and re-processing them, Ruff grants them a pictorial autonomy. Thus, with the Machines series, Ruff not only investigates the history of photography, but also ponders such fundamental questions as how something can appear in a picture, how we perceive pictures, and what role our assumptions about media play.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Edited by Matthias Winzen. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Valeria Liebermann and Per Boym.
All fields of contemporary Western life are captured by the lens of Thomas Ruff's large-format camera: petit bourgeois homes in the provinces and suburbs; modernist and current architectural structures; the startlingly alien faces of fellow human beings; the technologically sophisticated observation of outer space; studies of local neighborhoods by night; the news industry's non-stop invention of pictures; changing views on how we feel about our bodies; and modifications in perceptions through the pictorial explosion of the Internet. Since the early 1980s, Thomas Ruff has created a substantial photographic oeuvre in which he draws our attention to all of these familiar subjects, simultaneously marshalling a precise, fascinating rendition of our perceptual universe and a conceptually matter-of-fact presentation of untold layers of meaning and photographic premises. This catalogue gathers, for the first time, all of the work he has created since 1979, placing his most important and familiar works in the context of his entire oeuvre. Substantial reproductions are accompanied by scholarly essays, an annotated catalogue raisonn» of works since 1979 and an illustrated biography.
Thomas Ruff: Interieurs
Thomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff: Editions 1988–2014
Thomas Ruff: Photographs 1979-2011
Thomas Ruff: Series
Thomas Ruff: Schwarzwald Landschaft
Thomas Ruff: Surfaces, Depths
Thomas Ruff: Jpegs
Thomas Ruff: M.D.P.N.
Thomas Ruff: Machines
Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the Present