Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
A lot more happens between picture and viewer than you think... It’s all a matter of resolution. One could compare it to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal; the closer you look, the less you recognize.
With digitalization you can change parts of the picture very easily. It’s not serious if you do it for yourself, or within the arts, but in my eyes it’s a crime if you do it for the news.
I’ve been interested in the genre of nude photography for a long time. What I find altogether boring is contemporary nude photography of the kind currently carried on by fashion photographers, who take supposedly interesting photographs of pretty models in some pleasant ambience. That’s something for adolescent 13-year-old
Max readers. I’m 41, and when I’m naked I’m either lying in the tub or in bed with my girlfriend. My nude photographs are intended to be somewhat “more adult.”
I don’t believe in the psychologizing portrait photography that my colleagues do, trying to capture the character with a lot of light and shade. That’s absolutely suspect to me. I can only show the surface. Whatever goes beyond that is more or less chance.
In a way I wanted to blot out any traces or information about the person in front of the camera. I also wanted to indicate that the viewer is not face-to-face with a real person, but with a photograph of a person.
Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.
I’m always present in my photographs as the author because I point to something, be it a face, a house, a star. I’m always there in the choice of subject and frame.
Why can people not just go and look at them and say: Aha, a large photo, a large head? Why can’t they just accept the picture as a picture and say: Thank you Mr. Ruff, you did that well?
