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Lot Essay
Since the early 1980s, Thomas Ruff has created a broad oeuvre that has repeatedly and radically blurred the lines between reality and fiction, and questioned the hard paradoxes of human perception. Through the manipulation, appropriation and alteration of digital imagery, Ruff pushes the boundaries of the conceptual possibilities of photography. In the artist’s own words, 'The realism of photography and its claims to tell the truth have always been manipulation, not just my interventions, which made it more obvious. But these are of course constantly intertwined. There is the manipulation in which I depict, and the manipulation of the photographic technique.'
In his monumental Jpeg series, Ruff utilizes digitally altered images of two extremes–clichéd skylines and war photography–primarily appropriated from the internet. Through enlargement of the images to the point of distortion, the pixels are broken down into blocks of color. In this way, these images become landscapes distorted by human manipulation. The landscapes, now reimagined, critique the impact on our own surroundings, and the Digital Age’s impact on our perception of images. Here, the heroic depiction of the Chrysler building, an icon of New York architecture, stands in the foreground, while a heavily pixilated background slowly reveals the ruins of the World Trade Center. The present lot is a meditation on the potential instabilities in a given photograph; whether caused by deceptive alteration by its maker, or by the subjective, experience-based readings that an image is bound to elicit.
In his monumental Jpeg series, Ruff utilizes digitally altered images of two extremes–clichéd skylines and war photography–primarily appropriated from the internet. Through enlargement of the images to the point of distortion, the pixels are broken down into blocks of color. In this way, these images become landscapes distorted by human manipulation. The landscapes, now reimagined, critique the impact on our own surroundings, and the Digital Age’s impact on our perception of images. Here, the heroic depiction of the Chrysler building, an icon of New York architecture, stands in the foreground, while a heavily pixilated background slowly reveals the ruins of the World Trade Center. The present lot is a meditation on the potential instabilities in a given photograph; whether caused by deceptive alteration by its maker, or by the subjective, experience-based readings that an image is bound to elicit.