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Background information
"This comprehensive monograph on the work of Thomas RUFF focuses on the photo series from the past 20 years, in which the artist, who is one of the most important representatives of contemporary photography, hardly ever picked up a camera himself. Instead, he used found photographs from a wide variety of sources for his mostly large-format images. The image sources range from 19th-century studio photography to machine-made photographs of distant planets, from post-war press photos to propaganda images from the People's Republic of China. In his examination of these different visual worlds, Ruff explores the technical conditions of photography in each series: the negative, digital image compression, or even the screening used in offset printing. At the same time, he takes a look at the afterlife of the images in archives, databases, and on the Internet, thus formulating highly complex perspectives on the photographic medium and the world that has always been photographed.
Content
This volume, edited by Susanne Gaensheimer, therefore offers not only an overview of Thomas RUFF's work over the past decades, but also of almost 170 years of photographic history." (Publisher's text, © Pressten Verlag, 2020)