source: art-directoryde
Thomas Ruff, geboren am 10. Februar 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, ist ein wichtiger zeitgenössischer Vertreter der konzeptionellen Fotografie. Ruff studiert 1977-85 an der Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf bei Bernd Becher.
Geprägt von der Becher-Schule beginnt er Ende der 70er Jahre mit einer Serie kleinformatiger, farbiger “Interieurs”. Mitte der 80er Jahre entfernt er sich immer mehr von einem rein dokumentarischen Konzept der Fotografie. Er beginnt, seine Fotografien zu inszenieren, um seine eigenen Ideen und Vorstellungen im Bild umsetzen zu können.
Anfang der 80er Jahre entstehen großformatige Porträtserien, die stets festgelegten Regeln folgen. Thomas Ruff fotografiert die Objekte frontal und isoliert von ihrer Umgebung vor einem einfarbigen Hintergrund.
Ab 1987 setzt er sich mit Architektur auseinander und fotografiert Industrieanlagen und Wohnsiedlungen. Ruffs Werk ist sehr vielseitig und nicht auf ein bestimmtes Sujet oder eine bestimmte fotografische Technik beschränkt. Für seine “Zeitungsfotos”, “Sterne” und “Nudes” verwendet er bereits vorhandene Materialien; die “Nachtbilder” entstehen mit Hilfe der Infrarottechnik und für “Andere Porträts” benutzt er eine Phantombildkamera. Mit seinen Aufnahmen ab 1990 macht Thomas Ruff auch auf die Rolle des verwendeten Mediums aufmerksam. Durch die Bearbeitung der Bilder mittels des Computers macht er beispielsweise deutlich, dass es keine “authentische” Abbildung durch die Fotografie geben kann, sondern dass das verwendete Medium die Abbildung wesentlich prägt und verfremdet. In den folgenden Jahren bezieht Thomas Ruff vermehrt das Internet in seine Arbeiten ein.
Seit 1999 ist Thomas Ruff Professor für Fotografie an der Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf und leitet 2000-2006 die dortige Fotoklasse. Er lebt heute in Düsseldorf.
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source: artnet
Thomas Ruff is a contemporary German photographer and prominent member of the Düsseldorf School. His broad oeuvre incorporates images of domestic interiors, austere portraits, blurred pornography, photograms, and found JPEGs which intend to spur the imagination rather than capture reality. “I think that historically photographs may have been made in a naive and honest way, when photographers believed in the ‘pencil of nature’ and recording what was in front of the camera,” he reflected. “But photography quickly came to be used in a prejudicial way, losing its innocence and consequently its ability to communicate.” Born on February 10, 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, Ruff studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during the late 1970s. The Becher’s treatment of photography as an open archive became an underlying structure for the young artist, as it did for his classmates Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Since the late 1980s, the artist has worked with found images of the night sky, his m.a.r.s. series of 2012, has further blurred the line between reality and fiction. Using satellite images of Mars and Saturn found on the Internet, the artist collaged, then rendered each image with 3D-effect software, before finally reproducing them as large-scale Chromogenic prints. Ruff continues to live and work in Düsseldorf, Germany. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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source: timeout
The word ‘ordinary’ hardly sounds like praise – but it’s one that can be applied to the work of Thomas Ruff in the best possible sense. One of several notable German photographers who pioneered a flat, deadpan kind of non-aesthetic at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy in the ’70s, Ruff has forged an entire career out of making subversively ordinary images, as is charted in this, his first major UK survey.

In the first space are his seminal ‘Portraits’: large-scale, passport-style pictures of friends and peers. Appropriately, nobody in them is smiling, or revealing anything, really. Ruff’s photos aren’t about emotion or psychology or any of that wishy-washy stuff. A trade-off between the wondrous and the banal, the artful and the functional, characterises his work. Take his starscapes, sourced from the European Southern Observatory, or his images of Mars, assembled from data sent across space by satellites orbiting the Red Planet. What makes these images so curious is that they’re utterly factual: the business of astronomers, not aesthetes.

More dramatic are his ‘Catastrophe’ pictures: lo-res jpegs of the 9/11 attacks, enlarged so that passages of the devastation are lost to pixelated confusion. These are excellent: Ruff clearly has something to say on the inuring effect of the endless replay-and-repeat of violence in the age of social media and 24-hour news cycles. His internet porn series should do the same – but has too little to say about its subject matter.

At his best, Ruff is confounding; at his worst, he’s overly tasteful. (His recent series of installation shots of famous exhibitions are coffee-table duds.). But, in an era when you can take, manipulate and publish a photo in the same time it takes to pick your nose, he’s a reminder that in the right hands, photography remains a craft that has the power to question its own supposed ‘truth’. He wants you to keep looking, probing and asking. The whole ordinary thing? That’s a decoy.
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source: publicopt
O alemão Thomas Ruff, um dos fotógrafos mais destacados do panorama artístico europeu, foi galardoado com o Prémio PhotoEspaña 2011. O júri destacou a sua personalidade artística radical, precisa e coerente e a sua experimentação em torno da fotografia.

O grande prémio da PhotoEspaña disntigue anualmente um fotografo pela sua carreira. O alemão sucede assim a nomes como Malick Sidibé, Martin Parr, Robert Frank, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Helena Almeida, Chema Madoz, Luis González Palma e Josef Koudelka.

“Thomas Ruff desenrolou a sua obra em diversos âmbitos temáticos, utilizando a cor como matéria expressiva e evidenciando-se no retoque digital e destacando-se pela sua constante experimentação em torno da fotografia”, escreveu o júri em comunicado.

Segundo a agencia Efe, o prémio foi uma surpresa para o fotógrafo que evidenciou que a última vez que o seu trabalho recebeu um reconhecimento deste tipo foi há quase 20 anos. Thomas Ruff agradeceu ainda a exposição sobre a sua obra apresentada na edição deste ano da PhotoEspaña.

O Prémio Bartolomé Rós, que distingue a melhor trajectória espanhola na fotografia, foi entregue ao madrileno Chema Madoz, pela originalidade da sua obre e a solidez do seu percurso, com uma linguagem conceptual e altamente sugestiva.

O espanhol, Prémio PhotoEspaña 2000, reconheceu que a presença dos fotógrafos espnhois no panorama internacional é escassa, destacando a importância de eventos como a PhotoEspaña.

O fotografo mexicano Fernando Brito recebeu o Prémio Descubrimientos PHE e Jan Cága foi distinguido com o Prémio OjodePez de Valores Humanos, pela sua série “Swimmers with a disability”.

A geleira Helga de Alvear venceu o Prémio Festival Off pela exposição de Isaac Julien “Ten Thousand Waves” e o Prémio de Melhor Livro de Fotografia do Ano na categoria nacional foi entregue a Bernard Plossu, com a obra “Europa”. Na categoria internacional, o Prémio de Melhor Livro do Ano foi para “Destroy this Memory”, de Ricard Misrach. A editora britânica Nobody foi ainda distinguida com o Prémio Editorial, pelas suas publicações “B Side”, de Stephen Grill e “Coming Up For Air” de Stephen Gill.