Negative (Negatives)

For the works in this series, Ruff inverts existing photographs into negatives. As the artist notes: “The negative, with which I have worked for more than twenty-five years and used nearly every day, has almost disappeared thanks to digital photography.... [It] was actually never considered for itself, it was always only a means to an end. It was the ‘master’ from which the photographic print was made, and I think it is worth looking at these ‘masters’.... [I turned] photographs into negatives in order to see their photographic reality reversed.”^1 
 
1 Thomas Ruff, cited in "On Photograms and Negatives: Thomas Ruff and Wenzel S. Spingler in Conversation with Valeria Liebermann," Thomas Ruff: photograms and negatives. Exh. cat. (Beverly Hills: Gagosian Gallery, 2014), pp. 15-16.