2021
For photographers who’ve made a living showing large format photographs in galleries and museums, the small-screen future of the medium can be a touchy subject. Generally, they either admit that the medium is in its death throes, or hold steadfast that Instagram and its increasingly destructive digital milieu is a seperate beast altogether. The German photographer Thomas Ruff believes in the former.
Thomas Ruff: In a sense I would say that photography is dead. People post on Instagram because they want to stay in the present––they expect photography to communicate the present. But as soon as you post an image, it’s the past. Even if it’s only two or three hours. When Kim Kardashian posts an image, it’s already the past.
In his most recent series, tableaux chinois, presented at David Zwirner Gallery Paris, Ruff takes images of Maoist propaganda and distorts them using a variety of digital techniques like pixelating, blurring, or layering. In one piece, tableau chionois_17, a pastoral painting of Mao postulating on a bench has been blown-up to the point of looking like it was downloaded using a dialup internet connection circa 1999.
Patrick McGraw: Why Chinese propaganda?
Thomas Ruff: The tableaux come from a general fascination with propaganda. Russian propaganda is quite hard, but the Chinese propaganda is kind of sweet – I call it naive propaganda. So I took these photos and gave them a digital structure to make them more contemporary. I wanted to play on the idea that technologically and economically, China is in the same same position as the western world, but ideologically they are living in the 1960s.