Lot Essay
‘I don't think my portraits can present actual personalities. I'm not interested in making a copy of my own interpretation of a person. It's more my personal idea of photography that is accentuated in my portraits. I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applied to a portrait. I take photos of people the same way I would take photos of a plaster bust’ (M. L. Syring and C. Vielhaber, Thomas Ruff in BiNationale, German Art of the Late 80's, Cologne, 1988, pp. 260-261).
One of Thomas Ruff’s most consistent subjects in his portfolio of works has been the portrait. Begun in the late 1980s, the Portrait cycle consists of an extended series of photographs taken of friends and colleagues at the Düsseldorf Academy, where Ruff studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher; like them, he consistently produces in serial form. Porträt (V. Liebermann) from 1999 is a head-and-shoulder portrait of a woman, who stares directly into the camera. Monumental, highly detailed and hyper-realistic, this is an unembellished portrait of a common person, devoid of expression. Although the woman is a personal acquaintance, she is photographed with a deeply cold and neutral eye, like an apparent stranger. Using an ordinary background chosen by the sitter, the closely cropped image is intended to be as neutral as possible to accentuate her face, but also the role of the camera in capturing it. Ruff's camera inspects the imperfections of the sitter’s face, and the viewer is left with limited information to create an imagined biography. The woman faces the camera under flat fluorescent lighting: a format immediately reminiscent of passport photos, mug shots, or other institutional identification. The artist has often acknowledged the reference to identification photos in this work, and draws inspiration from photographic modes of surveillance employed in Germany during the 1970s. In all of his works, Ruff reduces the role of the camera to its purest technical purpose: a tool that visually records what is in front of it.
One of Thomas Ruff’s most consistent subjects in his portfolio of works has been the portrait. Begun in the late 1980s, the Portrait cycle consists of an extended series of photographs taken of friends and colleagues at the Düsseldorf Academy, where Ruff studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher; like them, he consistently produces in serial form. Porträt (V. Liebermann) from 1999 is a head-and-shoulder portrait of a woman, who stares directly into the camera. Monumental, highly detailed and hyper-realistic, this is an unembellished portrait of a common person, devoid of expression. Although the woman is a personal acquaintance, she is photographed with a deeply cold and neutral eye, like an apparent stranger. Using an ordinary background chosen by the sitter, the closely cropped image is intended to be as neutral as possible to accentuate her face, but also the role of the camera in capturing it. Ruff's camera inspects the imperfections of the sitter’s face, and the viewer is left with limited information to create an imagined biography. The woman faces the camera under flat fluorescent lighting: a format immediately reminiscent of passport photos, mug shots, or other institutional identification. The artist has often acknowledged the reference to identification photos in this work, and draws inspiration from photographic modes of surveillance employed in Germany during the 1970s. In all of his works, Ruff reduces the role of the camera to its purest technical purpose: a tool that visually records what is in front of it.