Thomas Ruff

About this book

Over the course of his 30-year career Thomas Ruff (born 1958) has approached every genre of photography and coolly reinvented it. One of the greatest artists to use photography in the 21st century Ruff came of age in the 1980s alongside Andreas Gursky Candida Hfer and Thomas Struth in what was to become known as the Dsseldorf 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.