Thomas Ruff

Interviewed in his studio while at work and while setting up one of his recent shows, the noted German artist presents, with rigor and clarity, 30 years of photographic research and experimentation, produced following the lesson of Bernd Becher, his teacher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, to “reflect the medium in the image”. The director, who followed Ruff for two years, guides us through a discovery of the artist’s peculiar language, the sources of his work, his production and printing processes, and finally on his characteristic modes of presenting his famous series of works: from the first domestic interiors to the large-scale portraits, jpgs and nudes, up to his latest effort, a series titled m.a.r.s., produced by enlarging and modifying the colors of black and white topographic images of the planet’s surface, downloaded from NASA’s site on the Internet.