Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.
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I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That’s what is artistic about my photographs.
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My images are not images of reality, but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.
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The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
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I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.
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Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.
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If things are the way they are, why should I try to make them look different?
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You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that’s in front of the camera, but there’s always something beside it.
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