Artist Statement | Thomas Ruff

I started making portraits (with colored backgrounds) in 1981. I was studying at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and our heroes were the artists of Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. I had photographed interiors before, but what did not exist at that time was the portrait; it had simply disappeared in Minimal and Conceptual Art. I thought, let’s experiment with making a portrait like a traditional passport photo rather than a psychological portrait. I always told the people I photographed to look confident and at the same time be aware that you’re being photographed. It was a way of looking back at the camera. It was important to avoid any emotion. We do not show what we think.

My approach to the portrait was as follows: In a conversation you learn something about the person, but a picture cannot speak. I totally refused to learn anything about the person from the picture. I really wanted to bring the portrait back to point zero. This led to different reactions, for example that the portraits were anti-individualistic, cold , evil. Some people were afraid of them.

Maybe there’s a certain German tradition in this formal, systematic approach. Let’s talk about August Sander: I didn’t want to make the same “mistakes” as he had. Back in the 1920s, he thought he could represent an entire society, simply by taking people's professions as a basis: the craftsman, the industrialist, the lawyer and so on. That way, you could clearly assign their social status. But in the 1980s it was no longer possible to assign a clear social status to a person: The bank clerk went out in the evening as a punk, and the properly dressed man was suddenly an artist. None of the old categories worked anymore, so I wanted to rely on the face alone. I can portray the face. Everything else is pure interpretation on the part of the viewer.

Photography at that time was small format; large format was really the exception. Artists like Katharina Sieverding and later Astrid Klein were the first to work with it. In 1986, I chose the largest sheet format of Kodak paper: a roll 1.80 meters wide. It was really amazing, because I found that these large portraits were not just enlargements, but that the images suddenly had a completely different physical presence. The portraits were taken with a 4 × 5-inch large-format camera, with flash, short exposure times and a 300mm lens normally used in object photography. The depth of field was reduced by the long focal length, extending only from the tip of the nose to the ears. But what was in focus was super sharp… and that was the human face. The neutral lighting was due to the fact that we no longer live in the Stone Age and the firelight of caves, but in Western industrial societies with neon-lit parking garages. The large format undoubtedly led to the emancipation of photography in contemporary art. We were no longer considered second-rate artists, but were technologically at the forefront, on the cutting edge.