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Lot Essay
In the early 1980s, while still enrolled at the Dseldorf Art Academy (where he was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, like Andreas Gursky, Candida Høfer, and Thomas Struth), Thomas Ruff began taking a series of color portraits of friends and fellow artists. Some of his early sitters are now established figures in the art world; this work pictures critic and writer Isabelle Graw, currently the editor of the Berlin-based journal of contemporary art and theory Texte zur Kunst. Ruff sometimes shot his subjects in profile, or in three-quarters length, but most of the images resemble passport photos, taken face-on and showing only head and shoulders. His sitters were initially given a choice of monochromatic backdrops, but when he decided to print the photographs in massive, larger-than-life sizes, the artist switched to a single, neutral-colored background.
In this work, the young Graw stares back at the viewer, her lips together and eyes vacant in an expression of utter neutrality. In some ways these portraits have nothing to hide: we see not only clothing and hair and eye color but freckles, blemishes, and dilated pupils. Yet this starkly clear realism-a function in part of the photograph's immense scale and uniform, almost clinical lighting-seems to conceal as much as it uncovers. Ruff's subjects look blank, anonymous, and distant. Their lack of affect renders us uncomfortable at the same time that it gives rise to a series of unanswerable questions about them. Ruff's portraits powerfully exemplify his sense of the medium in which he works: "Photography pretends to show reality," he said in an interview. "With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not" (quoted in interview with Philip Pocock, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1993).
In this work, the young Graw stares back at the viewer, her lips together and eyes vacant in an expression of utter neutrality. In some ways these portraits have nothing to hide: we see not only clothing and hair and eye color but freckles, blemishes, and dilated pupils. Yet this starkly clear realism-a function in part of the photograph's immense scale and uniform, almost clinical lighting-seems to conceal as much as it uncovers. Ruff's subjects look blank, anonymous, and distant. Their lack of affect renders us uncomfortable at the same time that it gives rise to a series of unanswerable questions about them. Ruff's portraits powerfully exemplify his sense of the medium in which he works: "Photography pretends to show reality," he said in an interview. "With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not" (quoted in interview with Philip Pocock, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1993).