Thomas Ruff's most famous body of work "Portraits" features what you might expect... portraits. However, his interpretation of this is very different and unique from everyday portraits. The style of this particular body of work is very formal and simple. While working as the art director for the Dusseldorf post-punk band EKG, he used the band members as models for his photography. This genre of photography was not really studied at the Dusseldorf Academy but, you can see in the work it is highly influenced by the way they teach the subject by the symmetrical and flat images.

He first began his research into framing and the composition of historical portraiture and decided from this to use a style that is very plain and simple. The reason for this was to express his feelings that “a photograph is only able to express the superficial’ (http://www.tate.org.uk) and not convey deep emotions or a personnel insight into a persons life. Ruff believes that a photograph is only just a cover up or surface of someone or an object and there is no real meaning behind a photograph. With this as the drive of his project he took portrait shots of his friends wearing normal clothes using a medium format camera with emotionless expressions. These portraits were blown up to a very large size when displayed in galleries first in 1986.

An interview by Philip Pocock uncovers the reasons behind Ruff’s work:

“Philip Pocock: Unlike the Neue Sachlichkeit of Sander or Renger-Patzsch, there is a clear crisis of belief in the objectivity of your medium in your work. True or false?

Thomas Ruff: It's both. It's true and false. They also used the camera as an instrument to take pictures. The difference between them and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost bit by bit the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality.” (http://www.jca-online.com/)

Ruff’s answer suggests that he believes that photography does not capture reality and only what is placed in front of it.

For my homage of Thomas Ruff’s work I decided to go out onto the streets of Leeds and take portraits of people without them knowing and try and capture their true emotions. In the modern age we live in once people see a camera they tend to pose or try and appear how they want to be seen. People want to look their best in almost every photograph and can put on a face or create a surface to hide behind. By photographing random people in Leeds without them knowing I was able to escape the false surfaces and capture their real expressions.

http://www.jca-online.com/ruff.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/thomas-ruff-2602