鈥淧hotography is a kind of prosthesis for humans,鈥� says Thomas Ruff. A craft that began with nothing more than a lens and a photosensitive plate has turned into an art that involves a vast array of image-capturing devices that allow us to see far beyond the limitations of our own eyes.
Few have made more comprehensive creative use of these devices than Ruff, whose works have anticipated and riffed off key developments in photography over the past 40 years, from ubiquitous surveillance to face-swapping apps. In the 1980s, for example, he blew passport-style headshots up to colossal proportions that shockingly revealed every detail of his sitters鈥� features 鈥� detail that can now be captured by anyone with a high-resolution smartphone camera.
But it was those portraits that soured Ruff on conventional photography: he disliked the sense that he had staged the images to be 鈥渢he view into Big Brother鈥檚 camera鈥�, as he says at the opening of a retrospective of his works at London鈥檚 Whitechapel Gallery. So for his next project, Sterne, he set out to take 鈥渢he most objective photograph possible鈥�, procuring deep-field images of the night sky from the European Southern Observatory. Ruff, who says he struggled to choose between studying astronomy and art, cropped those images and created monochrome compositions that loom over the viewer with a kind of chilly grandeur.
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The realisation that he lacked the equipment or skills to take such pictures himself liberated Ruff to make use of other archive and found images, ranging from internet porn to decontextualised newswire pictures. His reworks invite the viewer to reflect on the production and uses of such images, often taken for granted. Nonetheless, an artist reconfiguring astronomical images might raise hackles: aren鈥檛 they self-evidently beautiful already?
For a more recent series, ma.r.s., Ruff took images from the HiRISE instrument mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. haven鈥檛 been bashful about promoting the beauty of their images themselves, turning them into a and a coffee-table book. But for Ruff, 鈥渃olour in space doesn鈥檛 exist, it鈥檚 nonsense鈥�. The colours in the official HiRISE images don鈥檛 represent what human eyes would see; introducing colour to space-probe imagery has become a rather competitive hobby for online enthusiasts.
So Ruff added his own colours to the raw HiRISE images 鈥� sometimes conforming to what was known of the Martian landscape, sometimes according to his own whim. 鈥淭here are no green sands on Mars,鈥� he laughs: the features in many of his pictures aren鈥檛 what we would see even if we viewed them with our own eyes. The photographic prosthesis can take us only so far. 鈥淏ut aliens could have completely different access to the electromagnetic spectrum,鈥� he says. 鈥淪o perhaps I鈥檝e also made images for aliens.鈥�
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