Interiors, 1979‑1983
Thomas Ruff (Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, 1958) is one of the names that resonates most in the recent history of photography. His commitment to the image for more than forty years has led to the exploration of a large number of very diverse themes and formal treatments that, however, maintain a thread of continuity evident if one observes his work closely.
His career began here, among the patterned wallpapers and immaculate tiles of the interiors of the homes of his friends and family. His debut work, Interieurs , was created during his time as a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where, under the tutelage of Bernd Becher, and fascinated by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, he began to make these photographic studies of the petty bourgeois homes in the Black Forest in which his generation grew up. Beginning with his own apartment in Düsseldorf, he continued with a string of interiors familiar to him from his youth, generating a collective portrait of a very particular moment in German culture. The atmospheres of these rooms, their decoration, their neatness and their stillness, take us into the customs, aesthetic tastes and intimacy of a silent and restrained society. When most of them were renovated to fit in with the new trends and new aesthetic tastes with the arrival of the 1980s, he put an end to this work in 1983.