Mind Map – Campany & Colberg

Key points extracted from reviews:

http://davidcampany.com/thomas-ruff-the-aesthetics-of-the-pixel/

http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/04/review_jpegs_by_thomas_ruff/

Campany on Thomas Ruff

• Aethetic and intellectual
• His work seems cold and dispassionate, willful, searching and perverse but at times surprisingly beautiful
• Works with found images or shoots his own
• His images seem to belong to everybody and nobody
• Ruff’s preference for working in series
• He searched for the images online, often following links from one site to another, following his own routes as we all do. But what does it mean so say that an image is ‘from the internet’? Is the internet an archive?
• All images that appear on the internet and/or printed in books and magazines today are digitised.  Nearly all images are digital even if they originated in non-digital or pre-digital forms.
• Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image. Of course he does this not by showing us the images on screens but by making large scale photographic prints, blowing them up far beyond their photorealist resolution. This might be the first time some of these images have ever taken a material form.
• The pixel has replaced the grain of photographic film. Either images are shot digitally or older analogue images are scanned and converted into electronic data.  Analogue photography developed an aesthetics of grain quite early on, especially through reportage.
• In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, graininess took on the connotations of ‘authenticity’, coded as a kind of limit to which the photographer and the equipment had been pushed
• The indistinct haziness of the images was treated as a sign of the sheer urgency of the situation and of extreme human endurance (even though Capa’s grain was actually the result of hasty processing by an assistant in the darkroom).  In the post war decades photographers borrowed this convention, using grain as an expressionistic device to speak of limits of one kind or another – personal, aesthetic, technical, artistic. It’s in the work of everyone from William Klein and Robert Frank to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Today it is almost a cliché but for a while at least grain became a sign of the virtuous materiality of the image and of the virtuous, embodied photographer.
• Pixels are quite different. They are grid-like, machinic and repetitive. They do not have the scattered chaos of grain. When we glimpse pixels we do not think of authenticity (although we may do one day)
• Ruff used pixels to dramatise images

Colberg on Thomas Ruff

• Thomas Ruff might be one of the most creative and certainly inventive photographers of our time. In fact, many people – especially adherents of photographic orthodoxy – will probably vehemently deny that most of Ruff’s recent work is actually photography.
• began to experiment with the ‘jpeg’ images after 9/11
• the images were terribly low resolution. With the […] jpeg structure and the results from work with image structures I managed to modify the terribly poorly resolved but still visually aesthetical images my way.
• Ruff eventually expanded his jpegs into a rather large set,
• But then there is this unease that I’ve had with this work, which I expressed several times on this blog (find the most recent example here). The tremendous beauty of some of the images notwithstanding, the concept itself seems to rely a bit too much on the technique itself. What else is there? Make no mistake, there is nothing wrong with producing beautiful images

Write 300 words

Find a Ruff image and review (decided on Jpeg ca02)

Resize 2 of own image giving brief description of effect achieved.