THOMAS RUFF (B. 1958)

‘When I started, it was just an investigation into the history of photography — there wasn’t any social context I was interested in or aware of — and nude photographs are a very important genre. I had my first Macintosh and access to the internet, so I started my research — and who shows up? Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh. And I thought, oh, this is really a 19th-century male look at the female body, not very interesting. So I typed in ‘sex’ and then ‘fetish’ and suddenly those teaser pages on the porn pages showed up and I thought, woah, what’s that? And — not all, but a lot of them, were much more honest than the artistic nude photographs I had seen so far. But they were thumbnails, very small. I had already started investigating the structure of the digital image and I realised that if you calculate those files in a higher size and you shift the pixels, then it becomes kind of painterly’

-Thomas Ruff