C-Print, signed, numbered, edition of 4, 87 2/5 × 72 3/10 × 2 4/5 in – 222 × 183.7 × 7 cm. Contact Gallery.
About this artwork
Photographer Thomas Ruff’s “press++” comprises space-age images culled from the archival clippings of various American newspapers. Ruff scanned both sides of the original documents and layered them in Photoshop, thus presenting both the photos and the context—the smudges, cropping, commentary, and retouching—that surrounded their initial publication. “I think photography is still the most influential medium in the world, and I have to deconstruct these conventions,” he told Aperture in 2013: I try to find out how the image was created and in what context—historical, political, or social—the image belongs … There are a lot of different photographs, and different photographs have different intentions. Fine art, medical, propaganda, and of course the most influential image-production machine is advertisement. This transformation, let’s say, of the scientific photography into the art world, or advertising photography into politics (as seen in the last U.S. election)—this modification of images from one intention to another brings about interferences. The image, and the meaning of the image, changes.”
About the Artist
Thomas Ruff, German, b. 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. 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.
