Portrait (F. Simon)

In the early 1980s, when neo-expressionist painting had cornered the art market, German artist Thomas Ruff embarked on an extended series of photographic portraits that bear a strong resemblance to police records or passport pictures. The frontality of the plain, unadorned faces and the neutrality of expression, lighting and background appear to aim for a maximum objectivity, or, in Ruff’s own words, a “super-neutral matter-of-factness”. However, the large format and the sharpness of detail destabilize conventional photographic parameters such as likeness, identity and documentation. These faces are possessed of an auratic presence oscillating between attraction and vulnerability, intimacy and alienation. In an interview, Thomas Ruff described the process behind the pictures as follows: “I started with black-and-white, tried out different light sources, and then I began to gradually reduce what is seen in the pictures – until I eventually arrived at the passport photo, the ur-portrait. Then I thought: who could I photograph? In the end, it had to be my friends. I told them to look self-confident but to also keep in mind that they were being photographed. When I exhibited the large portraits, some people got angry at me because they just could not stand to just look at a portrait without being given any additional information.”