Thomas Ruff: Serien

Thomas Ruff is renowned for his conceptual approach. In the late 1970s he helped shape the paradigm shift from documentary to art photography and continues to enrich the genre with new ideas: from the interior views of German living spaces of the 1950s and ’70s, the oversize portraits, to the photographs of buildings reduced to their core, followed by shots of the night sky, which marked the first time Ruff did not create work based on his own photographs. The subsequent series were also shaped by the investigation and inspiration of found photographic footage. Here, Ruff’s main concern was not the mere depiction of an interesting scene but rather the idea from which these images evolved. The Negative series has Thomas Ruff relying on nineteenth-century original photographs, scanning the originals, inverting the appealing subjects into their negatives, and transforming the typical sepia tones into cyan blue, thus expanding the former manual photochemical process with digital cyanotypes.