Photographer Thomas Ruff: “I don’t care whether I work with a camera”

“How are you?” I ask, shaking the hand of Thomas Ruff at the entrance to David Zwirner’s three-floor gallery in a handsome 18th century townhouse in Mayfair, currently showing its latest of 13 exhibitions in total devoted to the celebrated German artist. “Grumpy for questions,” is his curt reply.

It’s an unpromising start to an interview, I cannot lie, but the night before he was all smiles at a Soho restaurant where the gallery celebrated the debut of Ruff’s new series, expériences lumineuses, with a fabulous dinner for a few dozen people. I was there also, so I understand why he’s feeling a little groggy. Thankfully, he begins to warm up once I steer him into the ground-floor rooms where his most recent work is on display.

He becomes particularly animated when I ask him about his time at art school. And if you know anything at all about Ruff, it’s probably that he came to prominence as one of the so-called Düsseldorf School in the 1980s, a disciple of the influential artist couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher. You may also know him as the photographer who no longer takes photographs. Because for the past 35 years he has almost exclusively worked with imagery that he didn’t make himself. Nor did he meet or experience the subjects the pictures depict, which range from the profound to the seemingly trivial.

Working towards discrete series that are usually accomplished over a number of years, he has used everything from press archives, space pictures, police mugshots, sales catalogues and propaganda photography, to imagery mined online, including pornography, anime and extreme pixelation. In doing so, he has referenced many of the medium’s dominant genres, such as portraiture, the nude, architecture, abstraction and, most recently, the scientific, exploring “the grammar of photography” as one writer put it.

These ‘found’ images or reappropriated picture collections usually had a certain use value, but Ruff divorces them from their intended purpose to say something about the workings of images in contemporary society. He examines the basic language of photography, attempting to extract the syntax from all extraneous meanings. “I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things,” he once said. And despite this seemingly reductive conclusion, arrived at while he was still studying, he has found endless variations on the theme.

Quite early on, Ruff tells me, he saw the potential in vernacular photography. “There are so many other kinds of photography—scientific, journalistic, amateur—that are at least as interesting, sometimes even more interesting, than all the art photography stuff,” he says. “I just have to pick one and kind of deconstruct it; to analyse how it works, see what is and what it was originally intended for. That’s what I do all the time. And it’s a large field. So, I can say that I already did a lot of digging, but when I die, there will still be a lot left.”

Ruff grew up as one of six children in a small town in southern Germany close to the Black Forest. He knew little about contemporary art when he arrived at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the fabled art school whose former students included Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter, both of whom would later return as professors. But he knew that he wanted to be a photographer, and figured that the Kunstakademie’s new photography class, founded a year earlier in 1976 by Bernd and Hilla Becher, was the place to be.

“I had learnt how to shoot beautiful photographs,” he tells me. “And so when I arrived and I saw the work of my future teachers, I was disappointed. They looked pretty boring: these industrial, black-and-white photographs. I had been shooting very colorful, amateur-world things. But, at some point, I realised, ‘Okay, everything I’ve done so far is kitsch. And the Bechers, they are right.’”

The Bechers had already been working together for nearly two decades, developing a series of typologies of the industrial relics of postwar Europe and North America—gas tanks, cooling towers, coal bunkers and the like—and presenting them together in grid form. Their precisely detailed yet otherwise straightforward photographs were unconcerned with conventional notions of beauty, yet in focusing on the formal visual qualities of their subject matter, they highlighted their cultural and historical value. And when they won the Golden Lion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, it was for sculpture, which probably tells you what you need to know about the status of photography in the art world until recently.

Along with Ruff, their students in those early years in the mid-1970s at the Kunstakademie included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte, a generational talent who became known as the Düsseldorf School. They would go on to have a formative impact on art and photography in Germany and beyond in the 1980s and 90s, starting out as rigorous adherents to the Becher’s teachings, adopting their formalistic approach, before taking it into distinct new directions.

Ruff is arguably the most successful. He doesn’t command the prices of Gursky, whose Rhein II sold for $4,338,500 at Christie’s New York in 2011. But, according to Artfact’s rankings, Ruff stands twelfth in its measure of the influence and success of the top 100 contemporary artists, living and dead. The next highest Becher School artist, Thomas Struth, stands at number 69. More importantly, he is the one that has gone on the biggest journey, moving far beyond his beginnings as a Becher student, yet somehow remaining true to their teachings. He was the first to start using colour, and to begin employing digital retouch. And he is the one who abandoned the camera.

Until recently, that is. His new series, expériences lumineuses, begun last year, appears to be a major departure from the past three decades in that he picked up a camera to shoot it. But Ruff doesn’t see it that way, no matter how much I suggest it must be more fun than being stuck behind a screen.

“Actually, I don’t care about whether I work with a camera or without. I learned [how to use] it, I’m experienced with it, so it’s not at all a problem if it’s necessary to pick out one of my cameras and shoot. It makes no difference to me.” He doesn’t go looking for new ideas, either, “they just show up”. And in this case, he saw an educational clip of someone moving a glass prism in and out of beams of light to show the refraction. It was a basic science experiment, but for Ruff it opened up a new field of study.

There are similarities with the abstract photography of the interwar era, such as those made by Hungarian Modernist László Moholy-Nagy. But the only direct reference he makes is to Berenice Abbott’s pioneering scientific illustrations. Shot in the dark of his basement, and then digitally inverting the results of his experiments to create a negative view, they also refer to the camera and to the analogue process itself.

“I want to make a very simple photograph and to explore the basis of photography, which is light beams and glass refraction,” he tells me. “And I really want to make very simple photographs to explore that.”