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Lot Essay
With his series of Stars photographs, which he executed between 1989 and 1992, Thomas Ruff returned to a childhood interest-he once thought he might become an astronomer. Ruff has employed a range of technical methods and tapped a variety of sources in his practice, including digital retouching, hand-tinting, photomontage, and borrowing images from the Internet, and for this series he used negatives that were made by others. Ruff purchased negatives documenting the night skies from the European Southern Observatory in Chile, selected individual details from them, and blew them up.
The stars, galaxies, and nebula pictured in these vast images lead a double life. They are of course scientific data, providing information about the cosmos only attainable though specialist equipment. But in Ruff's hands the dark glittering skies over Chile also become allover, abstract, black-and-white patterns, and the massive scale of these works summons the immensity of their subject. Ruff is well known for his claim that photography can only show the surface of things: in the case of Stars, the medium reveals a realm inaccessible to most humans, an expanse which is in turn captured in another of Ruff's majestically sweeping series.
The stars, galaxies, and nebula pictured in these vast images lead a double life. They are of course scientific data, providing information about the cosmos only attainable though specialist equipment. But in Ruff's hands the dark glittering skies over Chile also become allover, abstract, black-and-white patterns, and the massive scale of these works summons the immensity of their subject. Ruff is well known for his claim that photography can only show the surface of things: in the case of Stars, the medium reveals a realm inaccessible to most humans, an expanse which is in turn captured in another of Ruff's majestically sweeping series.