Giving Form to Light
By Susanna Brown
"This century belongs to light. Photography is the first attempt to give form to light, albeit in a transposed and—perhaps because of this—almost abstract form."
—László Moholy-Nagy1
In 1927, the photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) wrote Malerei, Fotografie, Film, part of the Bauhausbücher series published by Germany’s eminent school of art and design2. His erudite text discusses the birth of a “culture of light,” heralded by photography and cinema, and, leafing through the book’s one hundred illustrations a century later, one finds many parallels with Thomas Ruff’s long career. Both Moholy-Nagy and Ruff rigorously examine photography’s varied applications and purposes, from anonymous press pictures to portraits, architectural images, celestial studies, and abstractions. Both encompass a multiplicity of photographic processes and techniques, from negatives to photomontages and double exposures, and emphasize the possibilities afforded by rapidly evolving technology. Moholy-Nagy’s book includes some of the first images transmitted by wireless telegraphy (cutting edge in the 1920s), and Ruff’s series jpegs (2004–), investigates the transmission of photographs via the Internet, and the resultant shift from film grain to pixels.
Moholy-Nagy’s groundbreaking publication also includes four of his own abstract photograms and two by Man Ray (1890–1976)—cameraless images which provided a spark of inspiration for Ruff’s phg series, begun in 2014. More recently, Ruff’s project untitled# (2022–), took as a starting point Étienne Bertrand Weill’s Métaformes (1919–2001), which depict mobiles in motion; the outcome is a group of dynamic long-exposure abstractions in which light itself is the subject matter.
Ruff’s expériences lumineuses (2024–) builds on these previous series and pays homage to Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), who in 1959 described photography as “the medium pre-eminently qualified to unite art with science.” Her inventions included the “Abbott Distorter,” which manipulated photographs during printing, with bizarre results that harked back to her early collaborations with Man Ray and the surrealists, and her “Super-Sight Camera,” which enabled her to project an object onto light-sensitive paper at a large scale, maintaining sharpness by eliminating the need to enlarge a negative. Abbott’s desire to make “the abstract elegance and beauty of science visible” culminated in her Physical Science Study Project at MIT in 1958, for which she photographed light refracted through prisms to visualize the laws of quantum mechanics.
Each of the seven images in the series expériences lumineuses is a contemporary response to Abbott’s studies of light refraction. Ruff expands on her work by experimenting with multiple glass bodies, mirrors, and lamps, subsequently inverting his images to create a result that more closely resembles a drawing than a photograph. While Abbott’s small images were well suited to reproduction in book form, Ruff’s images resemble charcoal drawings and, at more than two metres tall, his monumental canvases demand to be seen in person.
This new exhibition is Ruff’s first solo show in London since 2018, when he was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum to create a series to inaugurate the museum’s Photography Centre. As a curator at the V&A at that time, I had the great pleasure of talking with him about his ongoing investigation into the grammar of photography. Ruff is a deep thinker, driven by his desire to push the limits of the medium: he contemplates a new idea from every angle before settling on the most suitable conceptual approach. This often results in a lengthy gestation, as was the case with flower.s, begun in 2018—Ruff grappled for many months with the subject matter before resolving to use the surrealist technique of solarization in tandem with a digital darkroom.
The exhibition unites photographs from every decade of Ruff’s career, beginning with his Porträts of the 1980s, inviting the visitor to examine at close quarters the affinities between projects that at first glance may seem disparate. It features works from the series Cassini (2008–2011) and Sterne (Stars, 1989–1992, 2020), pivotal projects in which Ruff gave up his authorship, instead choosing to appropriate images created by NASA and the European Southern Observatory. The photographs of stars encourage us to further consider the science of the transmission of light. The images are also about time: some of these stars may no longer exist based on the speed at which light travels. Ruff has often discussed his keen interest in astronomy, a fascination for “where we come from and where we go to” as he puts it. He might be called an astronaut of the photographic realm, traveling great lengths to understand the medium’s history, explore its present state, and visualize its future.
Notes
1. László Moholy-Nagy, “Die beispiellose Fotografie,” in Das Deutsche Lichtbild (Berlin: Verlag Robert and Bruno Schultz, 1927), p. 117. Original text: “Dieses jahrhundert gehört dem licht, die fotografie ist die erste form der lichtgestaltung, wenn auch in transponierter und - vielleicht gerade dadurch - fast abstrahierter gestalt.” 2. The book title translates as Painting, Photography, Film. It was the eighth book in the series of fourteen Bauhausbücher volumes published between 1925 and 1930. The series was edited by Moholy-Nagy and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.
