These works were created in response to a comment by a French art critic, who compared Ruff’s Porträts (Portraits)—his series of expressionless portraits begun in 1981—to fascist art and its idealization of a particular type of person. By following a predetermined pictorial idea and presenting his subjects as objectively as possible, Ruff’s earlier series set out to highlight the works as photographic constructs not to be simplistically equated with the actual person depicted. Here, he takes this idea one step further, creating a series of portraits in which all of the subjects have the same bright blue eye color, appropriated from one of the sitters and digitally inserted on the rest. These portraits further undermine the artificial association often made between image and reality, while also creating a thought-provoking analogy between the uses of digital imaging techniques and the possibilities of genetic engineering.
