The word ‘ordinary’ hardly sounds like praise – but it’s one that can be applied to the work of Thomas Ruff in the best possible sense. One of several notable German photographers who pioneered a flat, deadpan kind of non-aesthetic at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy in the ’70s, Ruff has forged an entire career out of making subversively ordinary images, as is charted in this, his first major UK survey.
In the first space are his seminal ‘Portraits’: large-scale, passport-style pictures of friends and peers. Appropriately, nobody in them is smiling, or revealing anything, really. Ruff’s photos aren’t about emotion or psychology or any of that wishy-washy stuff. A trade-off between the wondrous and the banal, the artful and the functional, characterises his work. Take his starscapes, sourced from the European Southern Observatory, or his images of Mars, assembled from data sent across space by satellites orbiting the Red Planet. What makes these images so curious is that they’re utterly factual: the business of astronomers, not aesthetes.
More dramatic are his ‘Catastrophe’ pictures: lo-res jpegs of the 9/11 attacks, enlarged so that passages of the devastation are lost to pixelated confusion. These are excellent: Ruff clearly has something to say on the inuring effect of the endless replay-and-repeat of violence in the age of social media and 24-hour news cycles. His internet porn series should do the same – but has too little to say about its subject matter.
At his best, Ruff is confounding; at his worst, he’s overly tasteful. (His recent series of installation shots of famous exhibitions are coffee-table duds.). But, in an era when you can take, manipulate and publish a photo in the same time it takes to pick your nose, he’s a reminder that in the right hands, photography remains a craft that has the power to question its own supposed ‘truth’. He wants you to keep looking, probing and asking. The whole ordinary thing? That’s a decoy.