Thomas Ruff – jpegs

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

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

The above links are referenced in the course manual in Part 1 Project 3 Surface and Depth.

The review by Colberg leaves you with the impression that he appreciates the work that has gone into producing jpegs but they are a little disappointed in it.

Colberg starts their review by admitting that Ruff is “possibly one of the most creative and inventive photographers around today”, but that “there are people that do not seen his recent work as actual photography.” Colberg does not explore this last idea, because it does not have a place in a review of a particular book.

jpegs was Ruff’s latest body of work in 2009 as can be seen by the date of the review (April 2009).

The book format for jpegs is, in the reviewer’s opinion, a better format that the larger ones used when exhibiting the work in a gallery. This highlights how careful we must be when considering how best to present our work. Going large may not always be the best idea.

Colberg feels that Jpegs relies too much on the technique used to produce the images while suggesting that there is more to them. This suggestion isn’t delivered on. The nature of the body of work does rely heavily on technique and this is not surprising.

Campany’s review is much more detailed and has a different feel to it, a more intense sensation, scholary approach to it.

Ruff’s work provokes different responses in people both as individually but also in a much larger, global, collective way. For instance, Campany sees it as cold, dispassionate but also sometimes beautiful.

Ruff’s uses archival images, not unusual because artists and photographers have been doing this for the last century.

MacCabe’s quote from his biography of Jean-Luc Godard ‘In a world in which we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue … may be the key to both psychic and political health’, is as appropriate now, if not even more so because of our ability to seek out entertainment not just in the home or other traditional entertainment venues but also while on the move, whether that be travelling for leisure or while undertaking our daily commute.

With the current political landscape around the world, the ability to rework dialogue is something that we see on an almost daily basis, as politicians say one thing and then try to change how what they said is taken by backtracking and explaining that their words were taken interpreted incorrectly or taken out of context.

Ruff’s jpegs is a series, something that he does with all his work, at least up until the time the review was published. The sources of Ruff’s work cannot be easily identified but it is possible to start to identify the different types of archives that may have been used. In fact, as this body of work is contemplated the number of archives increases when you include individual memory as an archive, one that is filled with memories whether a result of one of our senses or a combination of them.

Digital images, or digitized versions of print images are easy to manipulate. Probably more so than print images. When you can alter an image at its most basic level, it is possible to do anything with it. Sometimes that manipulation is difficult to detect. jpegs does not hide that manipulation, it showcases it.

Pixels are the modern equivalent of grain with analogue film. However, pixels have a more regimented structure, grain has a more natural, fluid, chaotic structure.

At the level that human’s view images and photos, it is possible to see different things, each image depicting something subtly different, but at their most basic level, all images are the same, just blocks of individual colour, reduced to streams of 0’s and 1’s stored on computer hard drives ready to be retrieved, viewed and even manipulated.

I’ve gone well over the suggested 300 word limit for this research point. I did consider precising it down to around the word limit but in the end left it as is because of what the content of both reviews, especially the second, provoked in how I found myself responding to what I’d read. Admittedly, this is more a response to the articles rather than the work they were discussing but I think that exploring where a topic leads you is an important part of research.