Thomas Ruff Artist Lecture Available Online
Friday, February 26th, 2010On the occasion of Aperture’s release of The Düsseldorf School of Photography, a comprehensive assessment of the influential photography movement, Aperture and the photography department in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design presented artist Thomas Ruff and writer, former picture editor, Philip Gefter, on February 12th at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore.
The artist’s talk focuses on Ruff’s early work and participation in the Düsseldorf School as well as his more recent work including images featured in the artist’s JPEGS monograph.
In this clip, Thomas Ruff goes through several key bodies of work following his professor Bernd Becher’s advice to always reflect on the photographic medium. Ruff speaks about his Portrait series which he started at the Düsseldorf Academy and explains how large scale has emancipated photography on the contemporary art scene in the 1980′s. Ruff also touches on the matter of objectivity versus subjectivity as well as on the notion of authorship with his Stars series. Finally when speaking of Jpegs, he focuses on the structure of images he finds on the internet and their distribution. By enlarging them, Ruff also plays with the perception of these images when the pixel patterns become sublime geometric displays of color.
To watch the full talk click here:
Copyright Thomas Ruff