Thomas Ruff Interviewed in Émergent Magazine

I would like to start by discussing the jpegs series. Does the compression grid itself become content for you, the jpeg almost becoming a medium in its own right, somewhat separate from photography?

Yes, exactly. I shot analogue for twenty, twenty-five years. Then photography became digitised, and I said, okay, this is a new tool, like a new lens: I have no preoccupation, so if I need it, I’ll use it. In 1996 I got my first email address, and at that time you still went onto the internet via modem, over the telephone line, so it took time to connect, there weren’t many pages yet, and it was very slow. I realised I was seeing a new structure in the image, something I hadn’t before. In the analogue world, the smallest part of the image was the grain of the film; then it changed to the pixel. And then, for the first time, I saw these jpg artefacts. Because the internet was so slow, images had to be very small; you know the acronym JPEG, Joint Photographic Experts Group, that was a jury that defined compression rates. So even though the images were small, say 2 megabytes, they were compressed down to 300 kilobytes to travel faster. But that compression rate had consequences for the structure of the image, and I found that interesting: not just the move from film grain to pixel, but continuing that journey to the jpeg artefact.

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