Thomas Ruff: Zeitungsfotos / Newspaper Photographs

Best known for his oversized, dead-pan portraits, his unmediated shots of commonplace interiors, and his seemingly straightforward photographs of architecture, Thomas Ruff has quietly approached many familiar genres, and proceeded to discreetly reinvent them. For his Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photographs) series, Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing Ruff’s viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the viewer’s inferences. The book consists of 400 reproductions from German newspapers that Ruff collected over the span of 10 years (1981–1991).