The photographer from the Düsseldorf school reveals his manufacturing processes in an exhibition which places him, through his experimental work, in the history of photography.
Saint-Priest-en-Jarez (Loire). When Alexandre Quoi went to Düsseldorf in 2020 to meet Thomas Ruff (born in 1958), he discovered the immensity of the German artist's studio, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The meeting focused on the retrospective scheduled at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, the first organized in France. Head of the institution's scientific department and curator of the exhibition, he came to explain to him the angle he envisaged for constructing the tour, " putting the series in chronological order, not starting from their production date, but from the date of the processes that Thomas Ruff investigates, or the image sources that he reuses, in order to demonstrate his conceptual and analytical approach that constantly questions what photography is. » Alexandre Quoi continues: "Hence the title of the exhibition, “Meta-photography”, in the sense that we are constantly, in his works, faced with a reflection on the material, technical, historical constituent of photography and its uses, while innovating on many levels. Thomas Ruff is a historian of photography, even an archaeologist of photography if we refer to recent works."