Main points selected from reviews of Thomas Ruff’s JPEGs

David Campany

Complexity of RUFF’s JPEGs

Ruff’s JPEGs series are considered by David Campany as offering up a number of opposing concepts ie “Intellectual & aesthetic”, “public as is private”, “anonymous as it is personal”, “The effect is to simultaneously emphasize and de-emphasize due to Ruff’s serialisation”

The juxtapositions within the series culminates in a complex of rational and irrational tension caused by the low resolution pixelation as stated “These are all phenomena that cannot be mapped or modelled in their detail. They are in a sense irrational, anarchic. We see these subjects throughout Ruff’s  grids of pixels. We switch from looking at figuration to abstraction and back again. The result is a great tension or drama. And it is tempting to see in this drama something of the character of modern life with its great forces of rationality and irrationality.”

The archive has influence

Ruff’s images come from the Internet and the series lives on the internet in many archives. Campany’s considerations on the tension between order created through the archival process and entropy created through wild and chaotic nature of images never mind the shear number.

Photography should reflect the medium

“Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image.”

Terribly poorly resolved but still visually aesthetical images my way. ‘Terribly beautiful’ images they were.” In a nutshell, this is the idea behind jpegs.

Printed medium works

Although taken from the internet, is in the form of digital data and designed to be presented on a screen, as stated by Jorg Colberg, “Ruff’s jpegs work amazingly well in book form”

Ruff’s JPEGs promise meaning but don’t deliver on depth

For Jorg Colberg Ruff’s JPEGs have an aesthetic value which is clear and strong enough to be justification in  it’s won right, however in searching for deeper meaning, which is apparently there to be seen he is unsuccessful or not convinced. “Images are beautiful but cant see what else there is with the concept of the JPegs which is thin”

I compare 2 photographs which i have taken myself over the past year or so with two of Ruff’s collection which I downloaded from the Internet. I selected my shots as I found them compositionally similar to Ruff’s. I found the process of reducing resolution to create a Ruff like pixelated version simple.

Alaska glacier