Speaking recently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Thomas Ruff said he used to "really believe that photography captured reality."
This would have been when Ruff was in his early 20s—he’s 58 now—and deeply under the spell of his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. The Bechers, husband and wife, were famous for their straight-on, rigorously composed black-and-white photographs of 20th-century industrial "types"—the water tower, the grain silo, the blast furnace, the coal mine tipple, the storage tank. For the Bechers, this systematic approach demonstrated what photography did better than any other medium while combatting "the gooey and sentimental subjectivist aesthetics "that photography too often embraced.
Come the late eighties, though, and with the onset of digital photographic technology, Ruff grew miffed that "reality did not look as I wanted it to look." His ambition was to produce "an ideal photo," not "the great and authentic reproduction." Let the Walker Evanses of the world do that. If a parked car or a large tree was somehow compromising the particular view of a building Ruff was determined to photograph, he no longer considered waiting for the car to be moved or striding to another vantage point. Thanks to the miracles of Photoshop and other digital manipulations, what offended the eye could be plucked from the image, banished to the electronic ether.
Since then, Ruff has become less and less interested in whatever truth claims photography may have, and more and more famous internationally as a result. For him, photography is a playground, a realm/reality unto itself, with an ever-expanding array of processes and potentials that are as interesting as the images they produce (and sometimes more so). Today, he likes to call his lens-based work "investigations," as in: "I make investigations that ask people to become aware of what they're looking at."