I’ve always thought that good images will still be good images, even if you printed them in a newspaper; but of course, art books are not printed like that. Except for Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths. The book, a survey of the artist’s work over the years, is printed on, well, what looks like the kind of paper you’d use for newspapers - it looks and feels just like it. The printing itself is of higher quality than what you find in newspapers, though. I came across Thomas Ruff - Surfaces, Depths by chance - visiting Ruff’s show at Zwirner gallery; and they had a copy on display (albeit none for sale).
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There is a sign right at the entrance of Pace Wildenstein gallery that tells you that you are not allowed to take any photos of Richard Misrach’s show. I forgot the exact words, if I remember correctly it’s for copyright reasons. So I only have an installation shot of Ruff’s show at David Zwirner gallery (click on the image for a much larger version).
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This past Friday, I went to New York to attend what had been advertized as An Exclusive Conversation Between Thomas Ruff and Philip Gefter. Given that Ruff spent over an hour presenting the history of his work, it was more like an artist’s talk, but it was tremendously interesting nevertheless. The following highlights are culled from my rather illegible notes, and they might shed a bit more light on an artist whose work is not very well understood on this side of the Atlantic.
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To a large extent, contemporary photography looks the way it does because of two major revolutions. The first, originating in the US in the 1970s, not only made colour photography the dominant image mode, but also opened up new ways of seeing. The second, originating in Düsseldorf, Germany, very forcefully also made us see things in new ways. Thankfully, there are now two new books that talk about these two revolutions. The first, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980, I reviewed last week. The second, The Düsseldorf School of Photography is the subject of this review.
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“I have progressed. Axel Hutte, Thomas Struth or Candida Hofer, for example, still all work on specific subjects for certain periods. But in my case I don’t distinguish between one area and the next - for me it’s much more of a slow process. But I also think that if you compare me to Thomas Ruff, you can see that he has moved on as well because what he is doing is maybe more like the work of a scientist who is trying to find out what the essence of photography is.” - Andreas Gursky
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The portraiture of Amy Adams and Louise te Poele could not be any more different. Both were contestants at this year’s Hyeres Fashion and Photography Festival, presenting their work to the jury - and the visitors.
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Thomas Ruff might be one of the most creative and certainly inventive photographers of our time. In fact, many people - especially adherents of photographic orthodoxy - will probably vehemently deny that most of Ruff’s recent work is actually photography. In general debates about whether something is photography or not, and if it’s not photography then what else, are not terribly exciting, and there is no need to get into them here. What is more interesting is to look at that work and to see what it does (call it photography, graphic design, visual art, whatever).
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So here’s the question: When does a shtick become a shtick? It might be easiest for me to explain this using an example. When I first saw Thomas Ruff’s jpegs I thought it was a very interesting idea, visually very intriguing, but I also had the nagging feeling that the whole series maybe didn’t contain much beyond the basic idea itself.
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People often tell me that Thomas Ruff’s portraits are boring. What does that mean: “boring”? How can a portrait be boring?
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