NUDES

Thomas Ruff
NUDES

Photographs: Thomas Ruff

Text: Michel Houellebecq

Publisher: Schirmer / Mosel

168 pages

Pictures: 99

Year: 2003

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 29,5 x 22,5 cm, color photographs. In good condition, yellowing of the paper and traces of rubbing on the pages and pictures (see pictures). Text in German, English and French.

Thomas Ruff, Düsseldorf-based photographer and Concept artist, was born in 1958 and attended the Bechers' master class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He embarked on a truly striking career as an artist with a stunning series of large-format photos of artist friends, all printed with astonishing sharpness. Not long thereafter he again made a splash on the art scene with his "Sternenhimmel/Stars at Night," a second series of photo-graphs, this time of the nocturnal firmament, once more printed in large formats. Thomas Ruff's most recent work is devoted to a theme which, while being considered scandalous by the media, has won the highest awards the art world has to offer. In "Nudes," he focuses on pornography, or rather on stills taken from pornographic scenes he has found on the Web, and then processes them electronically before blowing them up to immense proportions. Digitally colored, alienated by blurring

contours and at times eliminating focus, the content dissolves into more or less abstract fields of color, forcefully unnerving our perception, our expectations and our erotic fantasies. A short story by Michel Houellebecg, Ruff's dream author for the occasion, unequivocally points up what the photographer's pictures are about, namely the act of solitary surfing through artificial worlds, the distance of purported intimacy, sex and love in the age of the Internet and of swinger clubs. In other words, the end of Romanticism.

- Text from the dust jacket's flaps