‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head. In Conversation with Thomas Ruff’ by Louisa Elderton
2026
Thomas Ruff is already on holiday on an island off Italy’s coast when I interview him. When he picks up our Zoom call via his phone, the connection is initially a little shaky: Ruff’s suntanned face blurs in and out of clear definition, glasses, hair, and skin distorting briefly into an instant of abstraction. The artist himself becomes a streamed image that shifts in and out of focus with changing moments of clarity. This feels fitting, in part because it is also a key aspect of his “jpegs” series (2004–22), which is currently being exhibited at David Zwirner, New York — images captured via the internet that become more and less recognizable depending on how near or far you stand from their surfaces.
Now one of the most celebrated artists of his generation, Ruff initially studied photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Bernd and Hilla Becher. It was here that he learned and honed a conceptual approach to photography. Over the past five decades, Ruff has become known for his enquiry into the question of what it means to take a picture. This was the starting point for our conversation, during which Ruff also reflects on the relationship between technology, perception, and pictures, as well as his own autobiographical impetus in his imagemaking, and the tenderness of scale.
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