Object Relations grounds photography in an era when it was a thing you made with a machine and held in your hand.
In that very German way, Thomas Ruff, just 18, arrived at the crossroads that would define his life's pursuits: astronomer or photographer? A or B, nothing halfway or in between, please.
Ruff chose B, carving out one of the most notable careers as an artist in the medium of the past 30 years. But A, with its strange melding of scientific precision and deeply philosophical imagination—what might be, far beyond our limited range of view from this tiny speck of dirt—haunts most every image he makes, whether way out there or right here on Earth.
Object Relations, the new show of Ruff's work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, is less concerned with all that than it is Ruff's hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up approach to a medium that's becoming less tangible and material by the day. Look at Instagram and you'll see what I mean, as old images replace new moment by moment, washed away in a sea of likes before they have a moment to stagnate.
Ruff's practice is to look more closely. "I think he's really dealing with the physicality of the photographic medium," says Sophie Hackett, the AGO's associate curator of photography, who stewarded Object Relations into being. "His works are very labour intensive. He’s a problem solver."