Meet the photographer | Thomas Ruff — Transcript

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1. 0:00[Music]
2. 0:10my name is Thomas Roth I'm an office
3. 0:13working with photography I started
4. 0:16underground better at the article in
5. 0:18Dusseldorf and that was a kind of a very
6. 0:20objective way of taking photographs I
7. 0:24really thought that photography captures
8. 0:27reality and it's the most true medium in
9. 0:31the world this is not really right
10. 0:35because the camera is recording what is
11. 0:39in front of the lens this reality can be
12. 0:41pre-arranged our heroes at the Art
13. 0:45Academy where minimalistic conceptual
14. 0:48artists I had the impression that the
15. 0:50portrait had disappeared in contemporary
16. 0:53art so I tried to bring the portrait
17. 0:56back 2.0 in a very conceptual
18. 1:00minimalistic way just show the face with
19. 1:04little expression
20. 1:06I practiced this kind of portrait
21. 1:09photography for over five years and
22. 1:11printed them in a smaller size
23. 1:13I developed the wish of printing a
24. 1:17really large scale print of a portrait
25. 1:20and those portraits then became very
26. 1:22successful people were really surprised
27. 1:26because a large scale photograph had
28. 1:29complete new pictorial quality in 1987 I
29. 1:34started photographing buildings going
30. 1:38out into the street a lot of things
31. 1:41disturbed me my belief in the truth of
32. 1:45photography already had some losses and
33. 1:47I thought Thomas you are not so much
34. 1:50interested in the real situation but in
35. 1:53the image itself I then decided to
36. 1:56retouch things digitally after I did the
37. 2:01portraits I got interested also in
38. 2:03scientific and medical photography and I
39. 2:07started working with these kind of
40. 2:09photographs negatives those photographs
41. 2:12are taken by even bigger machines that
42. 2:15can more or less work by itself I
43. 2:18realized there's a shift in authorship I
44. 2:21have a big affinity to astronomy and one
45. 2:24of my favorite home pages is the NASA
46. 2:28home page and what I found was really
47. 2:32high-resolution scans of the surface of
48. 2:35Mars and you could zoom in the image and
49. 2:39I like the structure of the surface the
50. 2:42photographs were taken in black and
51. 2:44white so I started coloring the Martian
52. 2:47surface you don't have the impression
53. 2:50that these photographs were taken by a
54. 2:52satellite
55. 2:54you cannot recognize an authorship
56. 2:57anymore I never was interested in
57. 3:00showing that I am the author of this
58. 3:03famous photograph but I was always
59. 3:08interested in image itself
60. 3:12if I want to create a photographic image
61. 3:14and cannot pull the trigger by myself I
62. 3:18don't care I want to have that image and
63. 3:21if anybody else or machine or robot
64. 3:25pulls the trigger it's fine the last 10
65. 3:30years I'm working mainly in front of a
66. 3:33computer screen my studio could be a car
67. 3:36garage I had the possibility to buy this
68. 3:40land and build a studio that could fit
69. 3:44perfectly for my work it's just great to
70. 3:48work in such a beautiful space
71. 3:50[Music]