Thomas Ruff

Girl with Flower Shirt
C-print, 1987


girl, blue shirt
C-print, 1987


woman black shirt
C-print, 1988


smiling women
C-print, 1987

Portrait (Isabelle Graw)
C-print, 1988

In the early 1980s, while German photographer THOMAS RUFF was studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the photography class of Bernd Becher, he started to work on his series of portrait photographs of artists and friends from the Dusseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats and later, from the mid-1980s onwards, as large scale color photographs. And it is with this work that he emerged on the international scene.

When I started with the portraits, it was with an awareness that we were living at the end of the twentieth century, in an industrialized Western country. We weren’t living by candlelight in caves anymore. We were in surroundings where everything was brightly illuminated—even our parking garages. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, and you were being watched all the time. When I started making the portraits in 1981, my friends and I were very curious about what might happen in 1984, ORWELL’s year.

My idea for the portraits was to use a very even light in combination with a large-format camera, so that you could see everything about the sitter’s face. I didn’t want to hide anything. Yet I also didn’t want the people I portrayed to show any emotion. I told them to look into the camera with self-confidence, but likewise, that they should be conscious of the fact that they were being photographed, that they were looking into a camera.

I wanted to do a kind of official portrait of my generation. I wanted the photographs to look like those in passports, but without any other information, such as the subject’s address, religion, profession, or prior convictions. I didn’t want the police/viewer to get any information about us. They shouldn’t be able to know what we felt at that moment, whether we were happy or sad.THOMAS RUFF in conversation with GIL BLANK for Influence magazine, Issue 2, 2004



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