Thomas Ruff

Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while still a student, he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s.

This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances from the Düsseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats.

Thomas Ruff (born 10 February 1958) is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images".

Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German photographers Laurenz Berges, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte.

The studio, a former municipal electricity station, includes a basement gallery.

One of six children, Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest, Germany.

In his youth, he was fascinated with Aldous Huxley's theories which inspired his photographs.

In a discussion with Philip Pocock, Ruff mentions a connection between his portraits and the police observation methods in Germany in the 1970s during the German Autumn.

In the summer of 1974, Ruff acquired his first camera.

After attending an evening class in basic photography techniques, he started experimenting, taking shots similar to those he had seen in many amateur photography magazines.

During his studies in Düsseldorf and inspired by the lectures of Benjamin HD Buchloh, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography.

Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy), where fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Angelika Wengler, and Petra Wunderlich.

Having worked with architectural subject matter since the mid-1980s, Ruff was enlisted to photograph the Krefeld buildings as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno.

In his studio between 1981 and 1985, Ruff photographed 60 half-length portraits in the same manner: Passport-like images, with the upper edge of the photographs situated just above the hair, even lighting, the subject between 25 and 35 years old, taken with a 9 × 12 cm negative and, because of the use of a flash, without any motion blur.

The early portraits were black-and-white and small, but Ruff soon switched to color, using solid backgrounds in different colors; from a stack of colored card stock the sitter could choose one color, which then served as the background.

The resulting Portraits depict the individual persons – often Ruff's fellow students – framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background.

In 1982, he spent six months at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris.

Ruff began to experiment with large-format printing in 1986, ultimately producing photographs up to seven by five feet in size (210 × 165 cm).

Because he found the effect of the colors too dominant in these, Ruff chose a light and neutral background for the portraits he made between 1986 and 1991.

By 1987 Ruff had distilled the project in several ways, settling on an almost exclusive use of the full frontal view and enlarging the finished work to monumental proportions.

Art critic Charles Hagen, writing for The New York Times, commented: "Blown up to wall-size proportions, the photographs looked like gigantic banners of Eastern European dictators."

The series Häuser was created between 1987 and 1991.

Ruff's building portraits are likewise serial, and have been edited digitally to remove obstructing details – a typifying method, which gives the images an exemplary character.

Of these Ruff notes, "This type of building represents more or less the ideology and economy in the West German republic in the past thirty years."

These first series were followed in 1989 by images of the night sky, Sterne, which were not based on photographs by Ruff, but rather on archived images ('Catalogue of the Southern Sky', including 600 negatives) he had acquired of the European Southern Observatory in the Andes in Chile.

These photographs of the stars, taken with a specially designed telescopic lens, are described and catalogued with the precise time of day and exact geographic position.

Ruff selected specific details from these photographs, which he enlarged to a uniform grand scale.

Architects Herzog & de Meuron soon became aware of this form of architecture photography and invited Ruff to participate in their entry for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1991 with a photograph of their building for Ricola.

Indeed, while experimenting with composite faces in 1992, Ruff came across the Minolta Montage Unit, a picture generating machine, used by the German police in the 1970s to generate composite portraits.

Through a combination of mirrors, four portraits, fed into the machine, produce one composite picture.

From 1992 to 1995, during the first Gulf War, Ruff produced his Nacht series (1992–1996), night images of exteriors and buildings using the same night vision infrared technology developed for use, both military and in broadcast television, during the Gulf War.

In 1993, he was a scholar at Villa Massimo in Rome.

Ruff commented on his influences: "My teacher Bernd Becher, showed us photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and the new American colour photographers."

He is often compared with other members of a prominent generation of European photographers that, includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Rineke Dijkstra.

Ruff started out reconstructing faces but soon found it more interesting to construct artificial faces, which often combine features of men and women, that do not, but could conceivably, exist in reality; this resulted in his Anderes Porträt series (1994–1995).

Ruff intended that large groups of the approximately eight-by-ten-inch color portraits would be hung together, so to add variety he photographed each person against a colored backdrop.

In 1999, Ruff made a series of digitally altered photographs of modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe.

The series l.m.v.d.r. – the initials of the architect – began as a commission offered to Ruff in 1999–2000 in connection with the renovation of Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany.

From 2000 to 2005, Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.