18 Facts About Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff was born on 10 February 1958 and is a German photographer who lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Thomas Ruff has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images".

One of six children, Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest, Germany.

Thomas Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while still a student, he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s.

From 2000 to 2005, Thomas Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

The early portraits were black-and-white and small, but Thomas Ruff soon switched to color, using solid backgrounds in different colors; from a stack of colored card stock the sitter could choose one color, which then served as the background.

Thomas Ruff began to experiment with large-format printing in 1986, ultimately producing photographs up to seven by five feet in size.

Indeed, while experimenting with composite faces in 1992, Thomas Ruff came across the Minolta Montage Unit, a picture generating machine, used by the German police in the 1970s to generate composite portraits.

Thomas Ruff started out reconstructing faces but soon found it more interesting to construct artificial faces, which often combine features of men and women, that do not, but could conceivably, exist in reality; this resulted in his Anderes Portrat series.

Thomas Ruff intended that large groups of the approximately eight-by-ten-inch color portraits would be hung together, so to add variety he photographed each person against a colored backdrop.

In 1999, Thomas Ruff made a series of digitally altered photographs of modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe.

Thomas Ruff selected specific details from these photographs, which he enlarged to a uniform grand scale.

From 1992 to 1995, during the first Gulf War, Thomas Ruff produced his Nacht series, night images of exteriors and buildings using the same night vision infrared technology developed for use, both military and in broadcast television, during the Gulf War.

In 2003, Thomas Ruff published a photographic collection of "Nudes" with a text by the French author Michel Houellebecq.

Thomas Ruff translated these images via a 3D computer-modeling program, but instead of his usual flattening, he gave volume to 2D.

Thomas Ruff has transformed the raw black and white prints with interjections of saturated color.

The objects and the light in Thomas Ruff's Photograms derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program.

Thomas Ruff's work is held in the following permanent public collection:.