Photographs Without Cameras: Going to Mars in Thomas Ruff's Bauhaus Spaceship

Thomas Ruff is arguably one of Germany’s best photographers, even though he rarely snaps a photo. He’s built his legacy on tech savvy and image appropriation, focusing on themes ranging from Internet porn to outer space. When Ruff started out, his photographs were austere and focused on Germany’s forgotten industrial buildings. He later shifted to mug-shot-esque portraiture. His giant half-bodied portraits of people staring directly into the camera lens reawakened an interest in the genre.

In some way, Ruff has been continually re-examining the portrait. In the 1990’s, using the Minolta Montage, a piece of police equipment used to combine facial features of multiple suspects, he created portraits of people who didn’t actually exist. In more recent work Ruff downloaded and blurred pornographic images from the web and printed them on large canvases creating a sort of portraiture of human sexuality and desire. Over the years, his work has gotten more abstract and increasingly veers away from traditional photography.

Today Ruff operates in an entirely digital darkroom. For his most recent work Photograms, a take on Bauhaus, he creates objects in a 3-D computer program and then renders the objects' shadows in a light-simulating software. The result is a series of colorful abstract images that would make Man Ray jealous.

Photograms is showing alongside m a r.s., a collection of appropriated NASA images of the Red Planet. I caught up with Ruff at a walk-through of his show at New York's David Zwirner Gallery to discuss Mars, stars, and the future of photography.

Motherboard: Appropriated images, which you use frequently in your work, are increasingly making their way into the art world. Do you think that what has happened to music is happening to photography?

Ruff: Yes, I guess there will be more appropriation, more sampling, like within music, but for me that is not the question or problem. It is really what you do with those images that counts.

In your series Nudes you appropriate pornographic images from the web and alter them in such a way that they become a shadow of the original. In other interviews you’ve talked about using appropriated media to create a grammar or language. How were you doing that in Nudes?

I think I said that, yes. The nudes are not so much about the media of photography, but about the distribution and how photographs are looked at even though, yes of course, they are photographs. But, I think in that case it was more about distribution and how people receive those images.

How do you think that idea relates to your series m a r.s.?

I’m not sure. So of course m a r.s. the images are definitely appropriated, but quite a big part of them is working with them and transforming them into the images they are now on the wall. I wouldn’t even say they are appropriated. [I] just use a source and then transform them into the image I wanted.

So much of your work is manipulated images, Why?

I wouldn’t call this manipulation, I would call this creation. Manipulation is a bad way of treatment either to people or objects or images, yes. I would call them creations, not manipulations. I have been working on manipulations, but to enlighten people to be careful when they are looking at photographs and not trust too much into photography. Because, yes, photography can be easily manipulate[d] especially since we are in the digital age. Alteration and manipulation has become easier and of course advertising is always lying.

You’ve done a lot of work that focuses on celestial entities starting first with your series Stars in 1989 and now again with your series m a r.s. What draws you to outer space?

Everyone should be interested in astronomy! Because cosmology can tell us where we come from and it may not be able to tell us where we go to, but for me astronomy is very essential in my life.

How do your photographs get at that?

So if I take Stars, probably it was that at that time I was very successful as a young artist in photography and I really wanted to show that there is scientific photography that is really beautiful and interesting. So at that time I created Stars.

I must confess that I don’t create images for other people. First of all it is my curiosity that drives me creating those. If I then think that this could be something of interest for other people then I decide to make them public. So with m a r.s. it was just my interest. It was probably 2009 or '10 when I discovered new and exciting images on the NASA homepage. Those were the images [from] the mars reconnaissance orbiter. This orbiter had a camera called a high rise orbiter, developed by the University of Arizona and this camera really was incredible because it has a resolution at about 1 meter. If you’re looking at the surface of mars on these images, the smallest detail has the diameter of about 1 meter. I was really shocked when I saw these high resolution images. Then what I wanted to do was to travel once around mars showing all different landscapes that exist on Mars.

With m a r.s. you use extreme close ups of the planet’s topography.

I wanted to show the variation of the different landscapes. So you have a lot of impact craters, you have a lot of desert with sand dunes and strange geological formations, you have geysers blowing up dust in the air and then making these beautiful features so actually I did not know what to show with these images - but I just was fascinated.

Some of the works in ma r.s. are 3-D anaglyphs. How did you achieve the almost surreal proportions of mars’ geological formations?

What I did was two things. Those images they were black and white and they had this kind of very long format. The first thing what I did was I compressed the image slightly and what happened then was you can see it here, the background slightly came up. So then you did not have the impression to look from a rocket or from the orbit down to the Martian landscape, but it’s kind of an aerial view as if you sit in an airplane looking down on the Martian landscape and of course that is completely fictional.

These Mars images they are on the one hand realistic on the other hand they are fictional. I think this is a big question in contemporary photography. I think many of my colleagues are busy on this issue.

I then discovered that NASA even did 3-d images from the Martian landscape. These are stereoscopic images so they are two images but taken by a slightly different angle and then superimposed with the red and green anaglyph method and if you now take the red-green glasses you can really see the Martian surface coming out, moving towards you. This of course is also kind of an absurdity.

You seem to be very drawn to abstraction both in m a r.s. and Photograms. Why?

Maybe because photography is so realistic. Every photographer is trying to go beyond this realism and get a small amount of abstraction in his work. Maybe I also had this kind of need.

You seem to take that notion even farther with Photograms. There are barely any recognizable shapes in these works.

So when I had the idea I was not at all interested in creating a new technology to create Photograms. I was really attracted by the images. And I was also attracted by the fact what you see on those images are not objects, they are just the shadows and a glimpse of an object. It’s just remnants. Even though they are virtual, they are virtually physically not there. It’s just the shadow that you see, or the inverted shadow. In the very beginning we tried to go close to Moholy Nagy. He used a lot of Bauhaus-designed objects.

How did you decide what technology to use to make these images?

That’s very simple. If you want to make a photograph of something very far away and you only have a 55 millimeter lens then you have to buy a 200 millimeter lens. And if you know that there’s a 200 millimeter lens you need to borrow it or buy it. And if the technology doesn’t exist well then you need to custom make it.

So how does your digital dark room work differently than Moholy Nagy’s traditional dark room?

[The objects] are not scanned, they are completely created here. The nice thing in the virtual darkroom, if you have an object, in the very beginning, it has no material. And then you can decide which material you can give to this object. I could give a mat paper to this so it would throw only a shadow. If I were to use the plastic or glass I would have refractions on the paper through this glass, and if I would put chromium on this bottle I would have a shadow and at the same time the chromium would produce light beams on the paper around.

Even in this case [of the] spirals, we put light on the spirals [and] we put the emitter at the material on the spirals and so now the spiral is throwing a shadow and at the same time its lighting other objects on the paper. Of course these are things that Moholy Nagy would have dreamed of. Yes with these new technologies there are more possibilities.

So probably if Moholy Nagy wanted to have this [object] standing like this, he had to have a small tile to fix it. What we do, plop, it’s fixed. And if I don’t like it I turn it around or do it like that or that. During rendering everything stays in the place where we put it. And so if we look at that when it’s finished rendering I can decide this is a nice composition, or I have to move objects, I have to add objects, I have to take out objects. And in the beginning we also thought we should give chance a chance. So we built a kind of a cloner where we could put in all of the objects and then we let them fall. They are animated and they fall on the paper, and yes, then they are fixed. And they are fixed also in time slices. I can go back. That is the advantage of these virtual dark rooms.

The other thing is we could then add color. We no longer depend on the black and white paper, which is not sensible to RGB. The other thing is we did not have to decide is, this bottle is only 20 centimeter or is it one meter. There was no scaling. The scaling came after looking at the first rendering and then you decide what kind of resolution you want to have, and in this case I went back to my standard format which is about 180 wide and about 250 high.

Any draw backs to the digital darkroom?

Yes. One problem we have is, we have really three beautiful fat Macintosh where we are working creating the photograms. And then yes, you have to render the images, and if we put them all together as one computer one of those images would render in one week. One week, yes. And then you cannot do anything more with those computers. They are blocked, they are working. And so, that was the reason that we built a small render farm. So we bought four PCs, just building what we need for rendering, and they are on the next floor. Now we send the data up there and now those six PCs are now rendering and they are not as big as the Macintoshes, but they can now render such an image in four days. And that was a problem because of the scheduled exhibition here. So we had to finish all of the works in four weeks. But now it’s very comfortable working. So we send the data up and a couple of days later we have the image and if you don’t have a tight schedule then that’s okay.

What do you think the future of photography is? Do you think technology will affect the kind of content the next generation of young artists will produce?

I must confess I have no idea what will be the future of photography, but of course I am very curious what the next generation or the next-next generation of young artists will do with photography.

I don’t think it has anything to do with technology. It’s, yes, I guess it depends on the idea, what you want to do with photography. You chose the tool. Either the analog camera or you do it with a very complicated technological system. I’ think that technology has never mattered. What really counts is the idea.

So when was the last time you took a photograph?

I haven’t taken a photograph in a very, very long time.

What’s next for you? Do you think that your work will continue moving toward abstraction?

I don’t even want to think about it. I’m too busy solving problems. If not this one, another one.