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Bei Ruff werden die Bilder einzeln stehend als Abzug im Holzrahmen mit Passepartout präsentiert.
The so-called thumbnail you find on the Web is the focus of each surfer appetite for desire. Internet provides the dream of scanning sex pages free of charge, quick desires made visible. Thomas Ruff appropriated images from this mine. The picture is not shot in a photo studio, nor in the streets, it turns out from a simple download from the World Wide Web. With its series of the "nudes" Thomas Ruff does not mean to describe the value of pornography in the information age. He is not even interested to pornography in itself. The quick gaze clashes with the reflection on gaze his own work stands for. One might say that it shows however, what is irreparably lost for art and life: the authenticity of the perception of the body. As he declared long time ago in an interview: "Photography has been used for all kinds of interests for the past 150 years. Most of the photos we come across today aren't really authentic anymore--they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it."
The "nudes", therefore, do not have an author in the traditional sense. We could dare to say that actually they are no photographies. The pictures are left in the anonymity of the global servers, they do not have an original negative to attribute itself. No more photographs? No more photography?
Bernard Fowler
Quellen (Nov. 2005):
http://www.postmedia.net/ruff/nudes.htm
http://www.artnet.de/artist/14677/Thomas_Ruff.html