Part 1 – Research Point

Research : David Company and Joerg Colberg’s reviews of jpeg’s by Thomas Ruff.

Brief : Read the reviews by Campany and Colberg and try to pick out the key points made by each writer.

Starting with David Campany, he has some contrasting views. He begins with pointing out that Ruff’s work sometimes seems cold, dispassionate, wilful, searching and perverse but at times surprisingly beautiful. He then goes on to state that Ruff dramatizes photography for us as an image form that is just as public as it is private, and just as anonymous as it is personal.

Campany brings up the point that all Ruff’s work to date has been serial, and states that the effect of this is to simultaneously emphasize and de-emphasize whatever is specific about his chosen photographs. Furthermore, he then points out that 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.

 A positive point Campany brings up is that Ruff switches between looking at figuration to abstraction and back again, the result of this is a great tension or drama.

Finally, to conclude, he states that Ruff’s JPEG series doesn’t work well on computer screens, and that the pictures need to be experienced as printed matter.

Going on to Joerg Colberg, he begins by claiming that Ruff was one of the most inventive and creative photographers of our time.

On the other hand, he then points out that the amount of detail in the images was actually not large enough to justify the sizes shown in the gallery. Both writers seems to be very fond of the series in book form, Colberg states that as a book everything works beautifully. He quotes “I give Aperture a lot of credit for producing this book”.

Towards the end of the review he claims he may be being a bit too critical, as he points out that the concept itself seems to rely a bit too much on the technique itself. In addition, he claims that the text in jpegs didn’t help him much, stating that at various stages he found himself thinking “now we’re getting somewhere”, only for the author to end a thought.

In conclusion, Colberg believes it was a stunningly beautiful book, and that seeing the images in the book has given him a re-appreciation for the sheer beauty of this body of work.