Thomas Ruff, 1958

Thomas Ruff studied photography under Bernd Becher at The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf towards the end of 1970's. According to Ruff, photography presents the viewer an illusion of reality, while it proves the impossibility of experiencing today’s world through this media. As the artist states; “Photography can only reproduce the surface of things. What people see, eventually, is only what's already inside them.” Thomas Ruff aims at liberating photography from the dependence of representing reality by modifying photographs he collects from various channels such as photo banks, the internet and newspapers, until there are no traces of the originals.

The “Substrat” series consists of manipulated Japanese manga and anime imagery collected from the internet. The artist uses intensively colored and mostly violent and erotic sequences from these comic books, which are very popular among youth and alternative to the real world. He manipulates images in order to turn them into abstractions of color and figures until there are no defining signs of the originals. Ruff’s photographic abstractions have intense and synthetic effects that may be perceived as both digital and painterly images.