His roots are in the objective photography of Dusseldorf school. This was a group of photographers who were taught in the late 1970's and 80's by Bernd and Hilla Belcher and included photographer Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, Angelika Wengler and Petra Wunderlich.
The Belchers are best known for their photographic series of industrial buildings and structures, and were linked with Conceptual Art, with their depiction of banal scenes with cool detachment.
Ruff studied photography at the Dusseldorf Art Academy between 1977 and 1985.
Starting in 1981, he photographed passport-like portraits in black and white, subjects between 25 and 35 years old.
The images had the upper edge just above the hair, even lighting, solid colour backgrounds, while the individuals were shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on and sometimes in profile. After 1986, he began to experiment with large-scale printing, producing images up to 2 by 1.5 meters.
The following year he settled on his format of a full frontal view and balancing any dominating colour by using a light and neutral background.
By appropriating this passport-style portraiture of young people with dead eyes and empty faces, he denies ability of the photograph to convey deep emotions of the sitter.
Instead, by the use of scale, the portraits are only able to express the superficial, the surface of the subject, because as a viewer we become involved in the detail, looking at every pore, hair and blemish.
Thus Ruff posits a photographic objectivity in the formalism of his approach with the monumental physical presence and deadpan rendering which overwhelms the individual personalities of those portrayed.
His subsequent series "Other Portraits", which enabled him to construct artificial faces from the combined features of men and women, exposed photographic objectivity to be a fiction.
The success of the series were to consolidated his international reputation and give him the financial freedom to work on subsequent series of photographs.
Portrait (P. Grote), 1986
Portrait Nr. 56/4, 1994
For me, it is the intensity of the gaze, both male and female which makes them such captivating and yet alarming portraits in their objective approach.
They are and will be very influential to my approach to photographic portraiture.
These could have been taken inside a photo booth, had not Ruff decided to blow up his pictures – and with it the faces of his characters – to monumental sizes.
The monumental size introduced in art photography in the 1980s – partly on account of the renewed interest in the relation between photography and painting – was tied to the wish to provide photography with an aura similar to that of painting.
The closer I came to Ruff’s huge portrait, the better I saw the details of the face but the less real the model seen as a person looked to me, increasing rather than diminishing the distance.
Ruff’s photographs look like photos for an identity card, that is identification photography, which presents measurable features rather than expressing personal identity, but the photos are sized like for an advertising board or political propaganda, other genres which also lack intimacy.
Contrary to the expectation with regard to a portrait to express personal identity, Ruff’s portraits emphasise that this is not possible.
Ruff himself explained that: “I have no interest to show my interpretation of a person. I depart from the idea that photography can only show the surface of things, the same goes for portraits”.
Personally, I appreciate and see were Thomas Ruff is coming from, what and how his peculiar style communicates.
However, what I look for in a work of art (and specifically in a fine art photograph) is "artist heat".
Being very direct, I really need to feel more passion and some warmer feelings than what Thomas Ruff expresses with his giant portraits.
Portrait (S. Weirauch), 1988
"Thomas Ruff's words amount to an ironic polemic against arbitrary interpretations of his photographs, and he likewise challenges the general availability of all things visible.
From the mouth of a pupil of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art this comes as no surprise.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, who teach at the latter institution, have promulgated a way of photographing architecture that is based on strict photographic realism, and in so doing have founded a veritable school.
But 'accepting a picture as a picture' neutrally, dispassionately and without passing judgment – that is no easy matter.
Thomas Ruff's portraits are unsettling simply on account of their immense scale.
Every detail, every pore, every pimple on these large-size faces is visible.
We would never stare so brashly at a living person.
Ruff's photographs dispense with this barrier of modesty.
We stare at the persons photographed – and they stare right back.
However, their distanced gaze in the pictures does not infest us.
On the contrary, it awakens our emotions.
We like or dislike the characters.
Some faces appeal to us, others less so.
And then we begin to think about who these people could be.
What are their occupations? Where do they come from? What is the story behind them?
Man is, by nature, curious.
We want to know what is hidden behind the facade, and a face is in a sense a facade." ("Dermatological realism" - DBAG website).
Portrait, 1988
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