Mentions Légales
Mentions Légales
Between 1981 and 1991, Thomas Ruff collected over 2,500 newspaper photographs from German-language dailies and weeklies. They are pictures that interested him or struck him as odd in some way. They cover all aspects of newspaper reportage: politics, finance, sports, culture, sciences, technology, history, and current events. The motifs reflect a kind of collective visual world of a specific generation. To be printed in the newspapers, the images were not chosen according to artistic criteria but rather by editorial considerations with the aim of illustrating a news story. Ruff narrowed his “archive” down to a selection of 400 images, which he had reproduced and printed in double column width (at a scale of 2:1) with no words of explanation. He settled on this procedure in order to focus on the appearance of the Newspaper Photographs and to question what information is left when the image is isolated from its function.