Face scans for air passengers to begin in UK this summer
Officials say automatic screening more accurate than checks by humans
Owen Bowcott
The Guardian,
Friday April 25 2008
Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.
From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.
Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.
But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.
They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.
Ministers are eager to set up trials in time for the summer holiday rush, but have yet to decide how many airports will take part. If successful, the technology will be extended to all UK airports.
The automated clearance gates introduce the new technology to the UK mass market for the first time and may transform the public's experience of airports.
Existing biometric, fast-track travel schemes - iris and miSense - operate at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travellers who enroll in advance.
The rejection rate in trials of iris recognition, by means of the unique images of each traveller's eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.
The trials emerged at a conference in London this week of the international biometrics industry, top civil servants in border control, and police technology experts. Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency, told one session: "We think a machine can do a better job [than manned passport inspections]. What will the public reaction be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer.
Some conference participants feared passengers would only be fast-tracked to the next bottleneck in overcrowded airports. Automated gates are intended to help the government's progress to establishing a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.
Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: "Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers."
Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: "It's a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn't even recognise gender. It's not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won't match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can't."
Project Semaphore, the first stage in the government's e-borders programme, monitors 30m passenger movements a year through the UK. By December 2009, API will track 60% of all passengers and crew movements. The Home Office aim is that by December 2010 the system will be monitoring 95%. Total coverage is not expected to be achieved until 2014 after similar checks have been introduced for travel on "small yachts and private flights".
So far around 8m to 10m UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier's facial details, have been issued since they were introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid after 2016.
Home Office minister Liam Byrne said: "Britain's border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don't want long waits. So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area [EEA] citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports [and airports]."
The EEA includes all EU states as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland.
2008/4/16
Thomas Ruff訪談 (Journal for Contemporary Art, 1993)
http://www.jca-online.com/ruff.html
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.
Pocock: What do you mean by real reality?
Ruff: Photography has been used for all kinds of interests for the past 150 years. Most of the photos we come across today aren't really authentic anymore--they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.
Pocock: Why did photography become so important in the art world?
Ruff: Maybe it's a question of generations. My generation, maybe the generation before, grew up with photography, television, magazines. The surrounding is different from a hundred years ago. Photography became the most influential medium in the Western world. So nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic, sachlich way. You can even do abstract photographs. It's become autonomous.
Pocock: There's little personality in your portraits, little use in the buildings, and a skepticism in photography' ability to communicate anything real in the Stars. Does this mean photography is empty in a traditional sense?
Ruff: It's empty in it sense of capturing real reality. But, for example, if I make a portrait, people say that there's little personality in it. They say that. But in a way there is because I know all of the people I photograph. Maybe the problem is that if in the same way I had photographed a famous person, it would be a different looking picture because we know another thing about this person.
Pocock: So they're anonymous . . .
Ruff: They're anonymous to you.
Pocock: You're dealing with the absoluteness of the medium, its picture perfectness. Would you agree with this?
Ruff: Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.
Pocock: And what about your relation to the picture?
Ruff: Well, maybe I can say it's my curiosity that makes me do each one because I want to see them. And then I go on.
Pocock: When I look at one of your portraits, or buildings, it's almost as though I can see more than is actually there.
Ruff: But I think that happens because it's a picture. It's a frozen picture, nothing moves. If you stand in front of a building, maybe you turn your head because there's a noise, something moves, so there is not this concentration. But when a picture is on the wall, frozen, you get a totally different kind of concentration. And with the portraits you cannot stand in front of him or her and see them as you do in one of my photographs. That's impossible.
Pocock: It's well known that you studied photography with the Bechers. Was that the start?
Ruff: At that time I didn't know their work.
I took twenty of my most beautiful slides, landscapes of the Black Forest and holiday pictures. It was very strange because they accepted me. In the first year I had a brief talk with Bernd Becher about the slides. He said that they were more or less stupid because those photographs were not my own photographs but cliches, and they were an indication of the photographs I had seen in magazines. They were not my own.
Pocock: Have you turned that around on your teachers, like the portraits are clearly related to standard ID photos?
Ruff: Yes, sure. The portraits are definitely a construct based on identification photographs.
Pocock: And the newspaper photographs are not your own?
Ruff: I couldn't do all that by myself. It was also important for me that they have already been printed, that they had been so-called important enough to be worth printing, even if they are only illustrations for a text. So the photograph itself doesn't tell you anything; it's the text that does. And if I cut off the text, what happens then?
Pocock: What quality do you look for in an news photograph?
Ruff: You know, all the newspaper photographs are standard, archetypal, like politicians shaking hands, or a rocket blasting off, a landscape somewhere. I can't tell you more than that. I just see it and I know it's the right photograph. Not that it' good but it makes a point for my idea.
Pocock: Some quick questions: What do you think of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon?
Ruff: I like them.
Pocock: Walker Evans, Eugène Atget?
Ruff: In my first years at the academy they were my most important influence. Perhaps Stephen Shore and William Eggleston were of similar importance to me there as the older documentary photographers but within color. And I still like looking at them.
Pocock: How does the American school of the seventies large-format photography differ form the Düsseldorf school?
Ruff: I think it's just a different landscape. America looks different from Europe.
Pocock: Why color in the portraits and not much color anywhere else?
Ruff: Color is close to reality. The eye sees in color. Black and white is too abstract for me.
Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn't used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It's also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.
Pocock: What about the buildings you photograph?
Ruff: I choose the buildings like the people I photograph. I know them from driving around and sometimes it makes click. Then I have to go back and see if it is really something, if it's possible to photograph it. I don't look for high architecture but that average style you find in any suburb of any Western city. It's color, shape, line. It's more geometric.
Pocock: How do you see repetition in your work?
Ruff: I wouldn't say repetition, but I would say I work in series. Not to prove to myself that I was right but I'm not satisfied with one picture but maybe with ten or fifteen or forty.
Pocock: I feel a certain anxiety when I see the portraits hung in a series. I'm reminded of that game as a kid: What is wrong with this picture?
Ruff: It's not "What's wrong?" but "It's a big puzzle." With one photograph there isn't enough information. Even I couldn't explain to an extraterrestrial all of mankind with my forty portraits of my friends. You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.
Pocock: Have you ever done portrait commissions?
Ruff: Not so much, but when I did portraits, people came and asked me. At that time everything was ready for doing portraits so I said, okay, sit in front of the camera.
Pocock: Is it something you tried to avoid?
Ruff: In my series of portraits they are all young, Some of those commissions I would never use for exhibitions.
Pocock: When you show so many portraits all at once, are you trying to convince us of something?
Ruff: Convince?
Pocock: To persuade us of something about these people?
Ruff: Maybe I have to say it differently. I've been asked a lot why my portraits never smile. Why are they so serious? They look so sad and like that. And I've been thinking about that. Maybe it has something to do with my generation. Like I use all-over lights, no shadows. We grew up in the seventies. The reality was that there was no candlelight. If you go through a place, through the car park, it's always fluorescent, so no shadows, just the all-over light. And in the seventies in Germany we had a so-called Terrorismushysterie: the secret service surveyed people who were against nuclear power; the government created or invented a so-called Berufsverbot. This meant left-wing teachers were dismissed, so sometimes it was better not to tell what you were thinking. All over we have those video cameras, in the supermarkets, the car park. In big places everywhere you've got those cameras. If you stand in front of a customs officer, you try to make a face like the one in your passport. So why should my portraits be communicative at a time when you could be prosecuted for your sympathies.
Pocock: This notion of surveillance seems to link nicely with the Night work. How far are you with this new Surveillance series?
Ruff: I started thinking about it at the beginning of last year. I had the idea of combining the surveillance aspect of the portraits with the darkness of the Stars.
Pocock: Are they all that green and black?
Ruff: Yes, I use a light-amplifying lens that is normally installed in tanks or military jets to see at night. It's another prosthetic use of the medium. If you use a microscope or a telescope you always see something you can't see with the naked eye.
Pocock: Why is it green?
Ruff: It's the authentic color from the phosphorescent screen and if it's green, it's green.
Pocock: Do you feel that one day you'll give up photography for electronic processes?
Ruff: I'm happy to work again with my own photographs after being in the studio since 1989 with the Stars and Newspaper photographs. Now I go out at night.
Pocock: They look like pictures of privacy. Are you investigating the idea of privacy?
Ruff: The first pictures I made were of backyards. It was January and really cold so I visited friends and took pictures from their rear windows.
Pocock: Is there a little bit of the voyeur in every photographer?
Ruff: These have been done with a device that detectives are starting to use, so they can work on stealing privacy.
Pocock: To solve crimes?
Ruff: Yes, this picture looks as though it could be a scene of a crime.
Pocock: The crime of photography. Is photography itself a crime?
Ruff: It can be.
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.
Pocock: What do you mean by real reality?
Ruff: Photography has been used for all kinds of interests for the past 150 years. Most of the photos we come across today aren't really authentic anymore--they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.
Pocock: Why did photography become so important in the art world?
Ruff: Maybe it's a question of generations. My generation, maybe the generation before, grew up with photography, television, magazines. The surrounding is different from a hundred years ago. Photography became the most influential medium in the Western world. So nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic, sachlich way. You can even do abstract photographs. It's become autonomous.
Pocock: There's little personality in your portraits, little use in the buildings, and a skepticism in photography' ability to communicate anything real in the Stars. Does this mean photography is empty in a traditional sense?
Ruff: It's empty in it sense of capturing real reality. But, for example, if I make a portrait, people say that there's little personality in it. They say that. But in a way there is because I know all of the people I photograph. Maybe the problem is that if in the same way I had photographed a famous person, it would be a different looking picture because we know another thing about this person.
Pocock: So they're anonymous . . .
Ruff: They're anonymous to you.
Pocock: You're dealing with the absoluteness of the medium, its picture perfectness. Would you agree with this?
Ruff: Photography pretends to show reality. With your technique you have to go as near to reality as possible in order to imitate reality. And when you come so close then you recognize that, at the same time, it is not.
Pocock: And what about your relation to the picture?
Ruff: Well, maybe I can say it's my curiosity that makes me do each one because I want to see them. And then I go on.
Pocock: When I look at one of your portraits, or buildings, it's almost as though I can see more than is actually there.
Ruff: But I think that happens because it's a picture. It's a frozen picture, nothing moves. If you stand in front of a building, maybe you turn your head because there's a noise, something moves, so there is not this concentration. But when a picture is on the wall, frozen, you get a totally different kind of concentration. And with the portraits you cannot stand in front of him or her and see them as you do in one of my photographs. That's impossible.
Pocock: It's well known that you studied photography with the Bechers. Was that the start?
Ruff: At that time I didn't know their work.
I took twenty of my most beautiful slides, landscapes of the Black Forest and holiday pictures. It was very strange because they accepted me. In the first year I had a brief talk with Bernd Becher about the slides. He said that they were more or less stupid because those photographs were not my own photographs but cliches, and they were an indication of the photographs I had seen in magazines. They were not my own.
Pocock: Have you turned that around on your teachers, like the portraits are clearly related to standard ID photos?
Ruff: Yes, sure. The portraits are definitely a construct based on identification photographs.
Pocock: And the newspaper photographs are not your own?
Ruff: I couldn't do all that by myself. It was also important for me that they have already been printed, that they had been so-called important enough to be worth printing, even if they are only illustrations for a text. So the photograph itself doesn't tell you anything; it's the text that does. And if I cut off the text, what happens then?
Pocock: What quality do you look for in an news photograph?
Ruff: You know, all the newspaper photographs are standard, archetypal, like politicians shaking hands, or a rocket blasting off, a landscape somewhere. I can't tell you more than that. I just see it and I know it's the right photograph. Not that it' good but it makes a point for my idea.
Pocock: Some quick questions: What do you think of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon?
Ruff: I like them.
Pocock: Walker Evans, Eugène Atget?
Ruff: In my first years at the academy they were my most important influence. Perhaps Stephen Shore and William Eggleston were of similar importance to me there as the older documentary photographers but within color. And I still like looking at them.
Pocock: How does the American school of the seventies large-format photography differ form the Düsseldorf school?
Ruff: I think it's just a different landscape. America looks different from Europe.
Pocock: Why color in the portraits and not much color anywhere else?
Ruff: Color is close to reality. The eye sees in color. Black and white is too abstract for me.
Pocock: Why stars? Do they mean something extra special to you?
Ruff: When I was eighteen I had to decide whether to become an astronomer or a photographer. I also wanted to move the so-called künstlerische Fotografie boundary. Do you know Flusser?
Pocock: No.
Ruff: He defines isolated categories for photography that sometimes cross over. For example, if medical photography is used in a journalistic way, or with the Stars, a scientific archive isn't used for scientific research but for my idea of what stars look like. It's also a homage to Karl Bloßfeldt. In the twenties he took photographs of plants to explain to his students architectural archetypes. So he was a researcher but the way he represented his intention with the help of photography made him an artist. I like these crossovers.
Pocock: What about the buildings you photograph?
Ruff: I choose the buildings like the people I photograph. I know them from driving around and sometimes it makes click. Then I have to go back and see if it is really something, if it's possible to photograph it. I don't look for high architecture but that average style you find in any suburb of any Western city. It's color, shape, line. It's more geometric.
Pocock: How do you see repetition in your work?
Ruff: I wouldn't say repetition, but I would say I work in series. Not to prove to myself that I was right but I'm not satisfied with one picture but maybe with ten or fifteen or forty.
Pocock: I feel a certain anxiety when I see the portraits hung in a series. I'm reminded of that game as a kid: What is wrong with this picture?
Ruff: It's not "What's wrong?" but "It's a big puzzle." With one photograph there isn't enough information. Even I couldn't explain to an extraterrestrial all of mankind with my forty portraits of my friends. You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.
Pocock: Have you ever done portrait commissions?
Ruff: Not so much, but when I did portraits, people came and asked me. At that time everything was ready for doing portraits so I said, okay, sit in front of the camera.
Pocock: Is it something you tried to avoid?
Ruff: In my series of portraits they are all young, Some of those commissions I would never use for exhibitions.
Pocock: When you show so many portraits all at once, are you trying to convince us of something?
Ruff: Convince?
Pocock: To persuade us of something about these people?
Ruff: Maybe I have to say it differently. I've been asked a lot why my portraits never smile. Why are they so serious? They look so sad and like that. And I've been thinking about that. Maybe it has something to do with my generation. Like I use all-over lights, no shadows. We grew up in the seventies. The reality was that there was no candlelight. If you go through a place, through the car park, it's always fluorescent, so no shadows, just the all-over light. And in the seventies in Germany we had a so-called Terrorismushysterie: the secret service surveyed people who were against nuclear power; the government created or invented a so-called Berufsverbot. This meant left-wing teachers were dismissed, so sometimes it was better not to tell what you were thinking. All over we have those video cameras, in the supermarkets, the car park. In big places everywhere you've got those cameras. If you stand in front of a customs officer, you try to make a face like the one in your passport. So why should my portraits be communicative at a time when you could be prosecuted for your sympathies.
Pocock: This notion of surveillance seems to link nicely with the Night work. How far are you with this new Surveillance series?
Ruff: I started thinking about it at the beginning of last year. I had the idea of combining the surveillance aspect of the portraits with the darkness of the Stars.
Pocock: Are they all that green and black?
Ruff: Yes, I use a light-amplifying lens that is normally installed in tanks or military jets to see at night. It's another prosthetic use of the medium. If you use a microscope or a telescope you always see something you can't see with the naked eye.
Pocock: Why is it green?
Ruff: It's the authentic color from the phosphorescent screen and if it's green, it's green.
Pocock: Do you feel that one day you'll give up photography for electronic processes?
Ruff: I'm happy to work again with my own photographs after being in the studio since 1989 with the Stars and Newspaper photographs. Now I go out at night.
Pocock: They look like pictures of privacy. Are you investigating the idea of privacy?
Ruff: The first pictures I made were of backyards. It was January and really cold so I visited friends and took pictures from their rear windows.
Pocock: Is there a little bit of the voyeur in every photographer?
Ruff: These have been done with a device that detectives are starting to use, so they can work on stealing privacy.
Pocock: To solve crimes?
Ruff: Yes, this picture looks as though it could be a scene of a crime.
Pocock: The crime of photography. Is photography itself a crime?
Ruff: It can be.
Thomas Ruff訪談
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/06/art/thomas-ruff
Thomas Ruff with Vicki Goldberg
by Vicki Goldberg
The German photographer Thomas Ruff achieved international recognition in the 1980s alongside Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, all students of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Of these three influential photographers, Ruff is the most experimental in theme and technique. He made his name with monumental, straight-on, emotionally uninflected portraits and went on to photograph—or appropriate and enlarge photographs or Internet images of—architecture, interiors, landscapes, nudes, stars, machines, and newspaper photos; he has also made night-vision photographs, superimposed negatives, and created montages, stereographs, and computer-altered images, including abstractions derived from Japanese manga.
In March, David Zwirner in New York showed Ruff’s recent altered photographs based on JPEG photographs from the Internet. This work made Ruff’s concern with questions of perception immediately visible: the pictures were nearly indecipherable from a great distance, resolved into recognizable images of landscapes and catastrophes at a middle distance, and dissolved into a mass of pixels up close. This interview was conducted in person in New York and later extended by e-mail.
Thomas Ruff: When I started at the Kunstakademie in 1977, I was an amateur. I took photographs like the ones you find in amateur magazines. I wanted to travel around the world taking beautiful photographs of beautiful landscapes and people. I thought that the most beautiful pictures were made at art academies, so I applied there. At that time Düsseldorf was the only art academy in Germany with a photography class. I applied with my twenty most beautiful slides, and strangely enough Bernd (Becher) took me.
I was completely shocked when I saw Bernd and Hilla’s photographs the first time—I thought they were boring industrial photographs, the complete opposite of my visual world. I was so shocked that I couldn’t work. The friends I made at the art academy were painters and sculptors. I started to look at art and realized my idea of images was the kitsch thing; the true thing was the Bechers. Bernd said to me, “Thomas, these are not your own images. They are imitations of things you have seen. They don’t come from your soul. But I accepted you because you use color in such a beautiful way.” I really believed the documentary photograph could capture reality. My heroes were Bernd and Hilla Becher, Walker Evans, the FSA photographers, Steven Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, just to name a few.
Vicki Goldberg (Rail): Were the photographs of interiors taken in that documentary spirit?
Ruff: I didn’t change anything. I only used light that came through the windows. I started doing interiors in black and white, then changed into color. The students in the Becher class said I couldn’t do that because documentary photography has to be black and white. They were more doctrinaire than the Bechers. But Bernd said, “This is beautiful. You should continue in color.”
Rail: How did your subjects feel about the deadpan, emotionally uninflected, even affectless nature of the portraits that first brought you international recognition?
Ruff: The people I took the portraits of were very happy with them. They were all proud. As I started that project during my time in the academy, I showed the first four portraits at the Rundgang, the end-of-the-year student show. Nobody said, “I don’t want to be photographed” when I asked them. It was just obvious for us to do it in that way. We had all read 1984 by George Orwell and were wondering, How will that year be in comparison to Orwell’s visions? We knew we lived in an industrialized society where you can find surveillance cameras everywhere; we looked at the camera in a very conscious way, with the knowledge that we are watched.
If you look at a portrait of a person, it can’t give you any information about the life of the sitter, like, is he going to have a visit from his mother in two hours? So what kind of information can a photograph deliver? I have no idea of what kind of information a portrait can convey. I think the possibilities of a photographic portrait are very limited. If there are photographers who say their portraits give more information than mine, I say they only pretend.
When you take a portrait of a little girl laughing, it tells that the girl is happy. What else? It doesn’t tell us that she loves her parents. We can only guess that she must and they’re good to her. Maybe she’s living with her grandparents because her parents are dead.
[August] Sander had this kind of sociological project of society: the boss, the employee, the worker, the farmer, the craftsman, all these kinds of professions, at a time when the differentiation had started to disappear, more or less. He really thought he could capture them and make a sociological encyclopedia about his time. When I started the portraits I excluded that immediately, [the implication that] if somebody’s wearing a worker’s clothes he’s a worker, if he is wearing a suit he is an employee. The dress code has changed so much; there is no recognizable code any more. I decided to concentrate on the face because that’s the most expressionistic part of the whole person.
When I made the portraits I thought, “We are all even, equal, nobody is more important than anybody else, and at the same time everybody is unique.” I wanted to treat all my friends equally, but I was conscious that every one of my friends is unique. Twenty years ago I said photography can only capture the surface of things. It cannot go beyond the skin of a person.
Rail: Do you still feel that?
Ruff: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The portraits are about mediated images, about photographic portraits, but at the same time it’s the person portrayed.
Rail: There is something stark in the clarity and isolation of those faces.
Ruff: If I make portraits, you can see only faces; if houses, only houses; stars with no planets or astronauts, pure stars…
It was very convenient to do the portraits because it happened in the studio, where you have no factors distracting you from the work. When you take a photograph outside of the studio, you have to depend on the weather and the circumstances of the motive, as cars could be parked in front of a house you want to photograph, or trees could be in the way, or other problems appear. As I was more interested in the image of the house than in photographing it in a documentary way, I waited until I had the right circumstances. But even so I had to manipulate two images out of the thirty I took.
My idea was architectural photography questioning the nature of reality. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision. It came from my everyday life. I was nineteen or twenty when I did the interiors. I had left my parents’ home. The work was probably about leaving home.
When I settled in Düsseldorf, my new friends studied at the academy also. I didn’t know old people or babies, so it was obvious [from the portraits] that I chose my nearest acquaintances. Then I worked on the image of architecture, the architecture surrounding my generation when I grew up. So it all was autobiographical.
Rail: You have also investigated the subject of architecture and modernism in your photographs of Mies’s buildings.
Ruff: At the end of the 1980s, I said in an interview that I can never photograph a Mies van der Rohe house because it’s already so beautiful. Mies is too big. That was pure egoism. Fifteen years later I thought I could make it up with him. When I did the Mies series, I was not afraid of his strength any more. I was able to change some of his architecture and its surroundings. I took away the color of the brick, made the sky flat, pale blue, so it looks like those awful 1950s social buildings where the big ideal was a Mies building from the 1920s. I treated not the buildings but the image of the buildings. Some of the interiors are a kind of psychedelic room. If he inhales, he gets a kind of flash, but only for a couple of seconds.
Rail: You worked from archival photographs, appropriating, as you often do.
Ruff: I didn’t have the time to go to Stuttgart, and in Berlin the situation was that I could not take photographs of the buildings at all, so I asked Terry Riley to send me archival photos. I colored them; I was sampling.
Appropriation developed into sampling. Sometimes you could say I’m appropriating, or sometimes I’m sampling. Using one image is appropriation, two or more is sampling. When I appropriate, I’m not questioning authority. It’s more pragmatic. When I did the stars [large pictures of the night skies, originally taken by astronomers] I realized I don’t have the equipment or the technology for taking the photographs myself. The work of taking the image should always be done by the most professional people. I’m professional with an 8×10 or a 4×5.
Rail: Didn’t you think about becoming a professional astronomer at one time?
Ruff: I had a telescope when I was fourteen. Photography and astronomy were my two high-school interests. I had to decide which [to concentrate on]. The stars were personal favorites of mine.
Rail: In the series of Anderes Porträts (Other Portraits) in 1995, you used a montage unit from a police history collection to superimpose two of your earlier portraits on top of one another and photograph the result. What was the impulse for this?
Ruff: When I started them, I wanted to reconstruct one of my portraits. Some critics wrote about my portraits that they were anti-individualistic and anonymous. I wanted to prove that the people depicted in my portraits are unique. It was important to me to make the Anderes Porträts in an analog way. I used a kit that the police use to build mug shots. I realized that I couldn’t reconstruct one of my portraits by matching parts [of the face]. But as I had the possibility to work with this kit, I said, “Okay, let’s do new faces that do not exist, in an analog, old-fashioned way.” I was altering photographic images but in an old fashioned way. There’s been such a lot of manipulation since the early days of photography; it didn’t start with the tool Photoshop. Just look at all those images with Stalin—who is still there and who has disappeared.
I wanted to give the viewer a chance to recognize that he’s standing in front of a manipulated image. I never made a secret out of my technical apparatus. Some photographers make a secret out of their technique. They’re afraid people could imitate it. Everybody should have the same basis and the same kind of technical opportunity. [An Anderes Porträt is] a new face, believable, but if you see the manipulation, you realize it’s an artificial face. I believe in my photographs.
Rail: In a way, you believe in the artificiality of your photographs. And what about the montages [a series of posters, mostly on political subjects]?
Ruff: (Laughs) I was trying to do something impossible. It was obvious that it’s completely stupid in a way to do montages. It’s not contemporary at all. Of course an artist’s comment on political decisions or disasters is also completely stupid, and to do this kind of work is stupid. But at the same time, I had a lot of fun. They look like bad posters for B movies, but politicians behave like actors in B movies.
Rail: The news photographs you showed are straight enough, and again they are appropriated.
Ruff: If I’d taken them, they never would have been printed.
Rail: What was your interest in photojournalism?
Ruff: I was collecting newspaper images for about ten years. At first I collected portraits, as I was working on the portraits, and I was interested in how other photographers did them. Then I was interested in other things, and I cut out what attracted me—images from the main pages, world politics, business, sports, arts, science, and so on. When I looked at them ten years later, I thought, this is a nice stamp collection. I had the idea of showing them, but the paper would turn brown in a couple of weeks. I decided to make a reproduction and also to enlarge it, to make you see the dots, so you’d definitely see that it was already printed.
Maybe by that time I already became slightly theoretical. I was interested in what happens when you take away a text from an image printed in a newspaper to illustrate the text. How much information will remain? Some scenes can’t be connected any more to anything; they’ve lost all information. But they keep their visual aesthetic. On the other hand, this kind of photography is the most mistreated in the world. An editor cuts part of the image not under aesthetic but under editorial reasons. I give them back some dignity by treating them as artworks. [Asked if he knew about John Szarkowski’s 1973 show, From the Picture Press, Ruff said he hadn’t heard of it.] These pictures show something very important, so important they were published in the newspaper and 100,000 people saw them. In the end they couldn’t keep their promise.
It depends on what you expect from a photograph. An art photograph within the art context doesn’t have to say very much because it is perceived by itself and has no reference except to itself. It doesn’t have to prove anything but be a good image. Journalistic photographs and other categories should have aesthetic qualities as well as contain information: “A picture says more than 1,000 words.” But it seems very hard to do that kind of photograph.
Rail: What sparked the series of night photographs made with an image intensifier?
Ruff: I had seen images on TV of the Gulf War; I was fascinated and offended. Technically fascinated with the visual appearance of what they showed and emotionally offended by what it means to view a war happening someplace else, broadcast in real time.
Rail: The Zwirner show’s subject matter included the eruption of Mount Saint Helens and two images of the World Trade Center on 9/11, as well as landscapes. This project began as an attempt to create an encyclopedia of contemporary history. Why an encyclopedia?
Ruff: I have a little daughter; she’s nineteen months old. In a way I want to explain the whole world to her. Maybe in the beginning I thought of a visual encyclopedia for my daughter, but then the work developed independent of that idea. The JPEGs start with Aa: American Architecture, and there’s An, African Nile. In the beginning, “Encyclopedia” was kind of a working title. In the meantime, I don’t think I can explain the whole world in images.
Most of the images were taken from the Internet, some come from postcards, others I took. What I did [with the digital images] was alter their pixel structure, enlarging them, sometimes changing the color slightly. That was all I did. You just have to find the right images within a selection of more then 1,000 images. Sometimes you find one that reminds you of classical images, like the landscape of burning oil that looks like a Caspar David Friedrich.
Rail: Not long ago, you exhibited brightly colored abstractions based upon images from Japanese manga. Why manga?
Ruff: Again, that was very pragmatic. I needed hard-edged colors, green beside red beside blue, as photographs are too smooth in color and graduation. For what I intended, I tried one substrat with different Alex Katz paintings. It worked, but the colors were not as intensive as the manga. The substrats are the result of the Mies psychedelic images. The buzzing of information on the Internet.…On the Net, you get such a lot of images and information you cannot hear or see anything any more, and then you see these colors.
Rail: Scale has been so crucial in the last two decades in photography. When did you begin making the monumental portraits?
Ruff: In 1981 I started making portraits in the size of 18×24 cm. Of course the camera records precisely what is in front of it, but I realized the one behind the camera has ninety percent of the control of the image. I chose the people, the light, gave them instructions like “head up, down, look self-conscious,” and so on.
Rail: You used large-scale color photography earlier than most. The size radically changes the picture’s impact, and it has been a highly influential strategy.
Ruff: For the first time with the big portraits, a completely different physical presence emerged. With the stars it was the same. The first images I displayed in my studio horizontally, but it wasn’t satisfying. The horizontal format is a window, but the images I had in mind weren’t a window. I wanted the door, suggesting, “Put on a helmet, go out into space, become a Captain Kirk.” That’s why I made them vertical and as big as possible.
Rail: The nudes are smaller…
Ruff: This is kind of a smoking parlor, the room where men sit together, have a smoke, and talk without the women. I imagined that they also have some kind of erotic images there, so I used a size that I thought would suit there. It wouldn’t have made sense to have them any larger.
Rail: The nudes were lifted from pornographic Web sites.
Ruff: I just don’t have the fantasy to do all these different kinds of things I found on the Internet.
Rail: Those images have been described as impressionist because of their soft, blurry quality. Is that what you had in mind?
Ruff: I must confess I didn’t think about impressionism but about the whole history of nude painting. What I wanted to do with the nudes was to create photographic images of nudes, but in a contemporary way. I wanted to show contemporary desire: the whole variety of sexual desire in our society today. I really wanted to show everything; I couldn’t show only male hetero desires but wanted also the male homosexual desire and all the fetish stuff. When I started my research on the Internet, I was quite surprised at the exhibitionism of people showing themselves naked, as well as the voyeurism of the people looking at them and the total anonymity of it all. The Internet is the perfect medium in which to show the self, make the contact, and also be an exhibitionist who shows his desires.
It’s about how our society deals with all these images. It’s more sociological. [The Internet] probably told me that not only sexual desire but all parts of life are exhibited, as in those stupid “Big Brother” soaps where normal people are invited into the camp and filmed night and day.
I wanted to make the pictures a kind of parlor size: 80×140 cm or 100×140 cm. If you enlarge a digital image just by calculating the pixels up, you get a very ugly structure. If you enlarge and shift the pixels to the right or the left, it’s cut into four, nine, or sixteen parts. The change happens by chance. I was experimenting at the time with pixels and didn’t have this kind of photography in mind. I was playing around. I applied it with one of those porn photographs and had this very strange, beautiful, and at the same time awful image.
Probably I’m working on a kind of grammar of the media. I want to understand how it works. I see images, and I don’t know how they were done; I have to find out how the image works, how we perceive it. The visible world is seen through the eyes, but it’s our brain that creates the images and our whole experience that gives meaning to what you see in the world. Especially in photography there’s still a lot of misunderstanding in regard to perception. In the early days of photography, people believed that the camera registers what’s in front of the lens, and it’s absolutely true. But now it is clear that the person behind the camera is controlling what is shown on the photograph. During the civil war in Yugoslavia, a news photographer might take an image of a wedding in front of a church, neglecting that next to it there might be refugees or people being killed. It’s the photographer’s decision what you see on a photograph. You could get a completely different impression of what happens, depending on the ideas of the photographer.
With digitalization you can change parts of the picture very easily. It’s not serious if you do it for yourself, or within the arts, but in my eyes it’s a crime if you do it for the news. You don’t have to manipulate [the picture], you [just] transfer the information you want people to see.
Rail: To what degree have you been influenced by the theoretical discourse on mediated images and the media?
Ruff: For a long time, photography was second degree because everybody can take one good photograph in his life. So that’s why artists working with photography invented this reflection about the media, but at the same time photography is already reflecting the media.
My work is not that theoretically based. I don’t go with a thesis and try to prove it. It’s a kind of trial and error. Mit dem Bauch denken—aus dem Bauch heraus means “according to instinct.” (Bauch is literally translated “abdomen” or “tummy.”) I grew up with TV, movies, photographic images on the wall, cheap calendars. It was just natural to pick up a camera and do photographic images, not paintings. It became more and more obvious that we live in this kind of mediated world. Advertising becomes more and more elaborated, and also TV becomes more and more commercial in Germany. The whole society goes on into consuming more and more and more.…People don’t think about working as something valuable, only free time. They work for vacations. They don’t think of Marx: selbstbestimmt arbeit—self-determined work. They work just to play golf or go to the beach. The working time is a horrible time; only the leisure is good. I’m the opposite.
Maybe in our society we are not only consuming products and nature but doing the same thing with information. Twenty years ago we had a journalistic ethos, but now in Germany an article that size [he holds up a finger and thumb close together], you read it just to forget it, the photograph coming with it too. In the end you don’t remember anything. The style, the language becomes so cheap that it’s really awful reading these magazines. And you find more and more advertising pages. We are consuming information, we swallow it and it is gone, it doesn’t reach our brain.
Asked if he was talking about this issue in his work, Ruff replied, “Maybe,” preserving in language the ambiguous nature of perception that lies at the heart of his photography.
Thomas Ruff with Vicki Goldberg
by Vicki Goldberg
The German photographer Thomas Ruff achieved international recognition in the 1980s alongside Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, all students of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Of these three influential photographers, Ruff is the most experimental in theme and technique. He made his name with monumental, straight-on, emotionally uninflected portraits and went on to photograph—or appropriate and enlarge photographs or Internet images of—architecture, interiors, landscapes, nudes, stars, machines, and newspaper photos; he has also made night-vision photographs, superimposed negatives, and created montages, stereographs, and computer-altered images, including abstractions derived from Japanese manga.
In March, David Zwirner in New York showed Ruff’s recent altered photographs based on JPEG photographs from the Internet. This work made Ruff’s concern with questions of perception immediately visible: the pictures were nearly indecipherable from a great distance, resolved into recognizable images of landscapes and catastrophes at a middle distance, and dissolved into a mass of pixels up close. This interview was conducted in person in New York and later extended by e-mail.
Thomas Ruff: When I started at the Kunstakademie in 1977, I was an amateur. I took photographs like the ones you find in amateur magazines. I wanted to travel around the world taking beautiful photographs of beautiful landscapes and people. I thought that the most beautiful pictures were made at art academies, so I applied there. At that time Düsseldorf was the only art academy in Germany with a photography class. I applied with my twenty most beautiful slides, and strangely enough Bernd (Becher) took me.
I was completely shocked when I saw Bernd and Hilla’s photographs the first time—I thought they were boring industrial photographs, the complete opposite of my visual world. I was so shocked that I couldn’t work. The friends I made at the art academy were painters and sculptors. I started to look at art and realized my idea of images was the kitsch thing; the true thing was the Bechers. Bernd said to me, “Thomas, these are not your own images. They are imitations of things you have seen. They don’t come from your soul. But I accepted you because you use color in such a beautiful way.” I really believed the documentary photograph could capture reality. My heroes were Bernd and Hilla Becher, Walker Evans, the FSA photographers, Steven Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, just to name a few.
Vicki Goldberg (Rail): Were the photographs of interiors taken in that documentary spirit?
Ruff: I didn’t change anything. I only used light that came through the windows. I started doing interiors in black and white, then changed into color. The students in the Becher class said I couldn’t do that because documentary photography has to be black and white. They were more doctrinaire than the Bechers. But Bernd said, “This is beautiful. You should continue in color.”
Rail: How did your subjects feel about the deadpan, emotionally uninflected, even affectless nature of the portraits that first brought you international recognition?
Ruff: The people I took the portraits of were very happy with them. They were all proud. As I started that project during my time in the academy, I showed the first four portraits at the Rundgang, the end-of-the-year student show. Nobody said, “I don’t want to be photographed” when I asked them. It was just obvious for us to do it in that way. We had all read 1984 by George Orwell and were wondering, How will that year be in comparison to Orwell’s visions? We knew we lived in an industrialized society where you can find surveillance cameras everywhere; we looked at the camera in a very conscious way, with the knowledge that we are watched.
If you look at a portrait of a person, it can’t give you any information about the life of the sitter, like, is he going to have a visit from his mother in two hours? So what kind of information can a photograph deliver? I have no idea of what kind of information a portrait can convey. I think the possibilities of a photographic portrait are very limited. If there are photographers who say their portraits give more information than mine, I say they only pretend.
When you take a portrait of a little girl laughing, it tells that the girl is happy. What else? It doesn’t tell us that she loves her parents. We can only guess that she must and they’re good to her. Maybe she’s living with her grandparents because her parents are dead.
[August] Sander had this kind of sociological project of society: the boss, the employee, the worker, the farmer, the craftsman, all these kinds of professions, at a time when the differentiation had started to disappear, more or less. He really thought he could capture them and make a sociological encyclopedia about his time. When I started the portraits I excluded that immediately, [the implication that] if somebody’s wearing a worker’s clothes he’s a worker, if he is wearing a suit he is an employee. The dress code has changed so much; there is no recognizable code any more. I decided to concentrate on the face because that’s the most expressionistic part of the whole person.
When I made the portraits I thought, “We are all even, equal, nobody is more important than anybody else, and at the same time everybody is unique.” I wanted to treat all my friends equally, but I was conscious that every one of my friends is unique. Twenty years ago I said photography can only capture the surface of things. It cannot go beyond the skin of a person.
Rail: Do you still feel that?
Ruff: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The portraits are about mediated images, about photographic portraits, but at the same time it’s the person portrayed.
Rail: There is something stark in the clarity and isolation of those faces.
Ruff: If I make portraits, you can see only faces; if houses, only houses; stars with no planets or astronauts, pure stars…
It was very convenient to do the portraits because it happened in the studio, where you have no factors distracting you from the work. When you take a photograph outside of the studio, you have to depend on the weather and the circumstances of the motive, as cars could be parked in front of a house you want to photograph, or trees could be in the way, or other problems appear. As I was more interested in the image of the house than in photographing it in a documentary way, I waited until I had the right circumstances. But even so I had to manipulate two images out of the thirty I took.
My idea was architectural photography questioning the nature of reality. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision. It came from my everyday life. I was nineteen or twenty when I did the interiors. I had left my parents’ home. The work was probably about leaving home.
When I settled in Düsseldorf, my new friends studied at the academy also. I didn’t know old people or babies, so it was obvious [from the portraits] that I chose my nearest acquaintances. Then I worked on the image of architecture, the architecture surrounding my generation when I grew up. So it all was autobiographical.
Rail: You have also investigated the subject of architecture and modernism in your photographs of Mies’s buildings.
Ruff: At the end of the 1980s, I said in an interview that I can never photograph a Mies van der Rohe house because it’s already so beautiful. Mies is too big. That was pure egoism. Fifteen years later I thought I could make it up with him. When I did the Mies series, I was not afraid of his strength any more. I was able to change some of his architecture and its surroundings. I took away the color of the brick, made the sky flat, pale blue, so it looks like those awful 1950s social buildings where the big ideal was a Mies building from the 1920s. I treated not the buildings but the image of the buildings. Some of the interiors are a kind of psychedelic room. If he inhales, he gets a kind of flash, but only for a couple of seconds.
Rail: You worked from archival photographs, appropriating, as you often do.
Ruff: I didn’t have the time to go to Stuttgart, and in Berlin the situation was that I could not take photographs of the buildings at all, so I asked Terry Riley to send me archival photos. I colored them; I was sampling.
Appropriation developed into sampling. Sometimes you could say I’m appropriating, or sometimes I’m sampling. Using one image is appropriation, two or more is sampling. When I appropriate, I’m not questioning authority. It’s more pragmatic. When I did the stars [large pictures of the night skies, originally taken by astronomers] I realized I don’t have the equipment or the technology for taking the photographs myself. The work of taking the image should always be done by the most professional people. I’m professional with an 8×10 or a 4×5.
Rail: Didn’t you think about becoming a professional astronomer at one time?
Ruff: I had a telescope when I was fourteen. Photography and astronomy were my two high-school interests. I had to decide which [to concentrate on]. The stars were personal favorites of mine.
Rail: In the series of Anderes Porträts (Other Portraits) in 1995, you used a montage unit from a police history collection to superimpose two of your earlier portraits on top of one another and photograph the result. What was the impulse for this?
Ruff: When I started them, I wanted to reconstruct one of my portraits. Some critics wrote about my portraits that they were anti-individualistic and anonymous. I wanted to prove that the people depicted in my portraits are unique. It was important to me to make the Anderes Porträts in an analog way. I used a kit that the police use to build mug shots. I realized that I couldn’t reconstruct one of my portraits by matching parts [of the face]. But as I had the possibility to work with this kit, I said, “Okay, let’s do new faces that do not exist, in an analog, old-fashioned way.” I was altering photographic images but in an old fashioned way. There’s been such a lot of manipulation since the early days of photography; it didn’t start with the tool Photoshop. Just look at all those images with Stalin—who is still there and who has disappeared.
I wanted to give the viewer a chance to recognize that he’s standing in front of a manipulated image. I never made a secret out of my technical apparatus. Some photographers make a secret out of their technique. They’re afraid people could imitate it. Everybody should have the same basis and the same kind of technical opportunity. [An Anderes Porträt is] a new face, believable, but if you see the manipulation, you realize it’s an artificial face. I believe in my photographs.
Rail: In a way, you believe in the artificiality of your photographs. And what about the montages [a series of posters, mostly on political subjects]?
Ruff: (Laughs) I was trying to do something impossible. It was obvious that it’s completely stupid in a way to do montages. It’s not contemporary at all. Of course an artist’s comment on political decisions or disasters is also completely stupid, and to do this kind of work is stupid. But at the same time, I had a lot of fun. They look like bad posters for B movies, but politicians behave like actors in B movies.
Rail: The news photographs you showed are straight enough, and again they are appropriated.
Ruff: If I’d taken them, they never would have been printed.
Rail: What was your interest in photojournalism?
Ruff: I was collecting newspaper images for about ten years. At first I collected portraits, as I was working on the portraits, and I was interested in how other photographers did them. Then I was interested in other things, and I cut out what attracted me—images from the main pages, world politics, business, sports, arts, science, and so on. When I looked at them ten years later, I thought, this is a nice stamp collection. I had the idea of showing them, but the paper would turn brown in a couple of weeks. I decided to make a reproduction and also to enlarge it, to make you see the dots, so you’d definitely see that it was already printed.
Maybe by that time I already became slightly theoretical. I was interested in what happens when you take away a text from an image printed in a newspaper to illustrate the text. How much information will remain? Some scenes can’t be connected any more to anything; they’ve lost all information. But they keep their visual aesthetic. On the other hand, this kind of photography is the most mistreated in the world. An editor cuts part of the image not under aesthetic but under editorial reasons. I give them back some dignity by treating them as artworks. [Asked if he knew about John Szarkowski’s 1973 show, From the Picture Press, Ruff said he hadn’t heard of it.] These pictures show something very important, so important they were published in the newspaper and 100,000 people saw them. In the end they couldn’t keep their promise.
It depends on what you expect from a photograph. An art photograph within the art context doesn’t have to say very much because it is perceived by itself and has no reference except to itself. It doesn’t have to prove anything but be a good image. Journalistic photographs and other categories should have aesthetic qualities as well as contain information: “A picture says more than 1,000 words.” But it seems very hard to do that kind of photograph.
Rail: What sparked the series of night photographs made with an image intensifier?
Ruff: I had seen images on TV of the Gulf War; I was fascinated and offended. Technically fascinated with the visual appearance of what they showed and emotionally offended by what it means to view a war happening someplace else, broadcast in real time.
Rail: The Zwirner show’s subject matter included the eruption of Mount Saint Helens and two images of the World Trade Center on 9/11, as well as landscapes. This project began as an attempt to create an encyclopedia of contemporary history. Why an encyclopedia?
Ruff: I have a little daughter; she’s nineteen months old. In a way I want to explain the whole world to her. Maybe in the beginning I thought of a visual encyclopedia for my daughter, but then the work developed independent of that idea. The JPEGs start with Aa: American Architecture, and there’s An, African Nile. In the beginning, “Encyclopedia” was kind of a working title. In the meantime, I don’t think I can explain the whole world in images.
Most of the images were taken from the Internet, some come from postcards, others I took. What I did [with the digital images] was alter their pixel structure, enlarging them, sometimes changing the color slightly. That was all I did. You just have to find the right images within a selection of more then 1,000 images. Sometimes you find one that reminds you of classical images, like the landscape of burning oil that looks like a Caspar David Friedrich.
Rail: Not long ago, you exhibited brightly colored abstractions based upon images from Japanese manga. Why manga?
Ruff: Again, that was very pragmatic. I needed hard-edged colors, green beside red beside blue, as photographs are too smooth in color and graduation. For what I intended, I tried one substrat with different Alex Katz paintings. It worked, but the colors were not as intensive as the manga. The substrats are the result of the Mies psychedelic images. The buzzing of information on the Internet.…On the Net, you get such a lot of images and information you cannot hear or see anything any more, and then you see these colors.
Rail: Scale has been so crucial in the last two decades in photography. When did you begin making the monumental portraits?
Ruff: In 1981 I started making portraits in the size of 18×24 cm. Of course the camera records precisely what is in front of it, but I realized the one behind the camera has ninety percent of the control of the image. I chose the people, the light, gave them instructions like “head up, down, look self-conscious,” and so on.
Rail: You used large-scale color photography earlier than most. The size radically changes the picture’s impact, and it has been a highly influential strategy.
Ruff: For the first time with the big portraits, a completely different physical presence emerged. With the stars it was the same. The first images I displayed in my studio horizontally, but it wasn’t satisfying. The horizontal format is a window, but the images I had in mind weren’t a window. I wanted the door, suggesting, “Put on a helmet, go out into space, become a Captain Kirk.” That’s why I made them vertical and as big as possible.
Rail: The nudes are smaller…
Ruff: This is kind of a smoking parlor, the room where men sit together, have a smoke, and talk without the women. I imagined that they also have some kind of erotic images there, so I used a size that I thought would suit there. It wouldn’t have made sense to have them any larger.
Rail: The nudes were lifted from pornographic Web sites.
Ruff: I just don’t have the fantasy to do all these different kinds of things I found on the Internet.
Rail: Those images have been described as impressionist because of their soft, blurry quality. Is that what you had in mind?
Ruff: I must confess I didn’t think about impressionism but about the whole history of nude painting. What I wanted to do with the nudes was to create photographic images of nudes, but in a contemporary way. I wanted to show contemporary desire: the whole variety of sexual desire in our society today. I really wanted to show everything; I couldn’t show only male hetero desires but wanted also the male homosexual desire and all the fetish stuff. When I started my research on the Internet, I was quite surprised at the exhibitionism of people showing themselves naked, as well as the voyeurism of the people looking at them and the total anonymity of it all. The Internet is the perfect medium in which to show the self, make the contact, and also be an exhibitionist who shows his desires.
It’s about how our society deals with all these images. It’s more sociological. [The Internet] probably told me that not only sexual desire but all parts of life are exhibited, as in those stupid “Big Brother” soaps where normal people are invited into the camp and filmed night and day.
I wanted to make the pictures a kind of parlor size: 80×140 cm or 100×140 cm. If you enlarge a digital image just by calculating the pixels up, you get a very ugly structure. If you enlarge and shift the pixels to the right or the left, it’s cut into four, nine, or sixteen parts. The change happens by chance. I was experimenting at the time with pixels and didn’t have this kind of photography in mind. I was playing around. I applied it with one of those porn photographs and had this very strange, beautiful, and at the same time awful image.
Probably I’m working on a kind of grammar of the media. I want to understand how it works. I see images, and I don’t know how they were done; I have to find out how the image works, how we perceive it. The visible world is seen through the eyes, but it’s our brain that creates the images and our whole experience that gives meaning to what you see in the world. Especially in photography there’s still a lot of misunderstanding in regard to perception. In the early days of photography, people believed that the camera registers what’s in front of the lens, and it’s absolutely true. But now it is clear that the person behind the camera is controlling what is shown on the photograph. During the civil war in Yugoslavia, a news photographer might take an image of a wedding in front of a church, neglecting that next to it there might be refugees or people being killed. It’s the photographer’s decision what you see on a photograph. You could get a completely different impression of what happens, depending on the ideas of the photographer.
With digitalization you can change parts of the picture very easily. It’s not serious if you do it for yourself, or within the arts, but in my eyes it’s a crime if you do it for the news. You don’t have to manipulate [the picture], you [just] transfer the information you want people to see.
Rail: To what degree have you been influenced by the theoretical discourse on mediated images and the media?
Ruff: For a long time, photography was second degree because everybody can take one good photograph in his life. So that’s why artists working with photography invented this reflection about the media, but at the same time photography is already reflecting the media.
My work is not that theoretically based. I don’t go with a thesis and try to prove it. It’s a kind of trial and error. Mit dem Bauch denken—aus dem Bauch heraus means “according to instinct.” (Bauch is literally translated “abdomen” or “tummy.”) I grew up with TV, movies, photographic images on the wall, cheap calendars. It was just natural to pick up a camera and do photographic images, not paintings. It became more and more obvious that we live in this kind of mediated world. Advertising becomes more and more elaborated, and also TV becomes more and more commercial in Germany. The whole society goes on into consuming more and more and more.…People don’t think about working as something valuable, only free time. They work for vacations. They don’t think of Marx: selbstbestimmt arbeit—self-determined work. They work just to play golf or go to the beach. The working time is a horrible time; only the leisure is good. I’m the opposite.
Maybe in our society we are not only consuming products and nature but doing the same thing with information. Twenty years ago we had a journalistic ethos, but now in Germany an article that size [he holds up a finger and thumb close together], you read it just to forget it, the photograph coming with it too. In the end you don’t remember anything. The style, the language becomes so cheap that it’s really awful reading these magazines. And you find more and more advertising pages. We are consuming information, we swallow it and it is gone, it doesn’t reach our brain.
Asked if he was talking about this issue in his work, Ruff replied, “Maybe,” preserving in language the ambiguous nature of perception that lies at the heart of his photography.
2008/4/14
Face values applied to love game
Face values applied to love game
People's attitudes to relationships could be given away by just the look of their face, it has been claimed - with men and women often after the opposite.
Researchers said men generally preferred women they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships, with women after longer-term matches.
Men with big jaws and small eyes were perceived as less committed by women.
The Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews worked with Durham University studying 700 people in their 20s.
The scientists said their research showed people could use their perceptions to make more informed partner selection depending on the type of relationship they were after.
This really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy
Dr Ben Jones University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab
Heterosexual participants were shown pairs of photographs of men and women in their early 20s.
Participants were asked to choose the face that they felt would be more open to short-term sexual relationships, one-night stands and the idea of sex without love.
They were also asked which face they thought was the most attractive for a long or short-term relationship, who was more masculine or feminine, and who they thought was generally attractive.
'Instinctive judgements'
These judgments were compared with the actual attitudes to relationships of the subjects in the photographs determined through a questionnaire.
Researchers said that the results determined many could accurately judge from photographs who would be more interested in a short-term sexual relationship or a long-term relationship.
Women who were open to short-term sexual relationships were usually seen by others as more attractive.
The men who were more open to casual sex were generally perceived as more masculine-looking, with squarer jaws, larger noses and smaller eyes.
Dr Lynda Boothroyd, of Durham University's psychology department, told the BBC Scotland news website: "This study shows we can make these kind of instinctive judgements for sex. We have a subconscious - not always right but reasonable - guide."
She explained: "Our results suggest that although some people can judge the sexual strategy of others simply from looking at their face, people are not always sure about their judgements possibly because the cues are very subtle.
"Yet preferences for different types of face were actually quite strong. This shows that these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates - or potential rivals - when we first meet them.
"These will then give way over time to more in depth knowledge of that person, as you get to know them better, and may change with age."
'Not presume'
Dr Ben Jones, of the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab, said: "Lots of previous studies have shown that people can judge a lot about a person from their face, including things like health and even some personality traits like introversion.
"But this really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy."
Professor David Perrett, a psychologist from the Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews, added: "While faces do hold cues to sexual attitudes, men should not presume any kind of relationship is wanted from appearance alone since women's choice is what matters.
"Indeed most women found promiscuous-looking guys unattractive for both short and long-term relationships."
The study, published in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behaviour on Wednesday, was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/7336578.stm
People's attitudes to relationships could be given away by just the look of their face, it has been claimed - with men and women often after the opposite.
Researchers said men generally preferred women they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships, with women after longer-term matches.
Men with big jaws and small eyes were perceived as less committed by women.
The Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews worked with Durham University studying 700 people in their 20s.
The scientists said their research showed people could use their perceptions to make more informed partner selection depending on the type of relationship they were after.
This really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy
Dr Ben Jones University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab
Heterosexual participants were shown pairs of photographs of men and women in their early 20s.
Participants were asked to choose the face that they felt would be more open to short-term sexual relationships, one-night stands and the idea of sex without love.
They were also asked which face they thought was the most attractive for a long or short-term relationship, who was more masculine or feminine, and who they thought was generally attractive.
'Instinctive judgements'
These judgments were compared with the actual attitudes to relationships of the subjects in the photographs determined through a questionnaire.
Researchers said that the results determined many could accurately judge from photographs who would be more interested in a short-term sexual relationship or a long-term relationship.
Women who were open to short-term sexual relationships were usually seen by others as more attractive.
The men who were more open to casual sex were generally perceived as more masculine-looking, with squarer jaws, larger noses and smaller eyes.
Dr Lynda Boothroyd, of Durham University's psychology department, told the BBC Scotland news website: "This study shows we can make these kind of instinctive judgements for sex. We have a subconscious - not always right but reasonable - guide."
She explained: "Our results suggest that although some people can judge the sexual strategy of others simply from looking at their face, people are not always sure about their judgements possibly because the cues are very subtle.
"Yet preferences for different types of face were actually quite strong. This shows that these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates - or potential rivals - when we first meet them.
"These will then give way over time to more in depth knowledge of that person, as you get to know them better, and may change with age."
'Not presume'
Dr Ben Jones, of the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab, said: "Lots of previous studies have shown that people can judge a lot about a person from their face, including things like health and even some personality traits like introversion.
"But this really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy."
Professor David Perrett, a psychologist from the Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews, added: "While faces do hold cues to sexual attitudes, men should not presume any kind of relationship is wanted from appearance alone since women's choice is what matters.
"Indeed most women found promiscuous-looking guys unattractive for both short and long-term relationships."
The study, published in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behaviour on Wednesday, was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/7336578.stm
Put young children on DNA list, urge police
Put young children on DNA list, urge police
·'We must target potential offenders'
· Teachers' fury over 'dangerous' plan
Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana
The Observer, Sunday March 16 2008
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'
Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database - the largest in Europe - but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. 'The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,' Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling - everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database - is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.
Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a 'science fiction novel'. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a 'police state'.
Pugh's call for the government to consider options such as placing primary school children who have not been arrested on the database is supported by elements of criminological theory. A well-established pattern of offending involves relatively trivial offences escalating to more serious crimes. Senior Scotland Yard criminologists are understood to be confident that techniques are able to identify future offenders.
A recent report from the think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) called for children to be targeted between the ages of five and 12 with cognitive behavioural therapy, parenting programmes and intensive support. Prevention should start young, it said, because prolific offenders typically began offending between the ages of 10 and 13. Julia Margo, author of the report, entitled 'Make me a Criminal', said: 'You can carry out a risk factor analysis where you look at the characteristics of an individual child aged five to seven and identify risk factors that make it more likely that they would become an offender.' However, she said that placing young children on a database risked stigmatising them by identifying them in a 'negative' way.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, denounced any plan to target youngsters. 'Whichever bright spark at Acpo thought this one up should go back to the business of policing or the pastime of science fiction novels,' she said. 'The British public is highly respectful of the police and open even to eccentric debate, but playing politics with our innocent kids is a step too far.'
Chris Davis, of the National Primary Headteachers' Association, said most teachers and parents would find the suggestion an 'anathema' and potentially very dangerous. 'It could be seen as a step towards a police state,' he said. 'It is condemning them at a very young age to something they have not yet done. They may have the potential to do something, but we all have the potential to do things. To label children at that stage and put them on a register is going too far.'
Davis admitted that most teachers could identify children who 'had the potential to have a more challenging adult life', but said it was the job of teachers to support them.
Pugh, though, believes that measures to identify criminals early would save the economy huge sums - violent crime alone costs the UK £13bn a year - and significantly reduce the number of offences committed. However, he said the British public needed to move away from regarding anyone on the DNA database as a criminal and accepted it was an emotional issue.
'Fingerprints, somehow, are far less contentious,' he said. 'We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library.'
Last week it emerged that the number of 10 to 18-year-olds placed on the DNA database after being arrested will have reached around 1.5 million this time next year. Since 2004 police have had the power to take DNA samples from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested, regardless of whether they are later charged, convicted, or found to be innocent.
Concern over the issue of civil liberties will be further amplified by news yesterday that commuters using Oyster smart cards could have their movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.
·'We must target potential offenders'
· Teachers' fury over 'dangerous' plan
Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana
The Observer, Sunday March 16 2008
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'
Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database - the largest in Europe - but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. 'The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,' Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling - everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database - is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.
Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a 'science fiction novel'. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a 'police state'.
Pugh's call for the government to consider options such as placing primary school children who have not been arrested on the database is supported by elements of criminological theory. A well-established pattern of offending involves relatively trivial offences escalating to more serious crimes. Senior Scotland Yard criminologists are understood to be confident that techniques are able to identify future offenders.
A recent report from the think-tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) called for children to be targeted between the ages of five and 12 with cognitive behavioural therapy, parenting programmes and intensive support. Prevention should start young, it said, because prolific offenders typically began offending between the ages of 10 and 13. Julia Margo, author of the report, entitled 'Make me a Criminal', said: 'You can carry out a risk factor analysis where you look at the characteristics of an individual child aged five to seven and identify risk factors that make it more likely that they would become an offender.' However, she said that placing young children on a database risked stigmatising them by identifying them in a 'negative' way.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty, denounced any plan to target youngsters. 'Whichever bright spark at Acpo thought this one up should go back to the business of policing or the pastime of science fiction novels,' she said. 'The British public is highly respectful of the police and open even to eccentric debate, but playing politics with our innocent kids is a step too far.'
Chris Davis, of the National Primary Headteachers' Association, said most teachers and parents would find the suggestion an 'anathema' and potentially very dangerous. 'It could be seen as a step towards a police state,' he said. 'It is condemning them at a very young age to something they have not yet done. They may have the potential to do something, but we all have the potential to do things. To label children at that stage and put them on a register is going too far.'
Davis admitted that most teachers could identify children who 'had the potential to have a more challenging adult life', but said it was the job of teachers to support them.
Pugh, though, believes that measures to identify criminals early would save the economy huge sums - violent crime alone costs the UK £13bn a year - and significantly reduce the number of offences committed. However, he said the British public needed to move away from regarding anyone on the DNA database as a criminal and accepted it was an emotional issue.
'Fingerprints, somehow, are far less contentious,' he said. 'We have children giving their fingerprints when they are borrowing books from a library.'
Last week it emerged that the number of 10 to 18-year-olds placed on the DNA database after being arrested will have reached around 1.5 million this time next year. Since 2004 police have had the power to take DNA samples from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested, regardless of whether they are later charged, convicted, or found to be innocent.
Concern over the issue of civil liberties will be further amplified by news yesterday that commuters using Oyster smart cards could have their movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.
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