In 2000, Thomas Ruff acquired several boxes containing roughly 2,000 glass negatives dating from the 1930s. They constituted the image archive of the former Rohde & Dörrenberg company in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel which manufactured machines and machine parts. The photos were originally produced for the company catalog and present its entire product line. In order to make it easier to cut out the object in question, which back then was done by hand, the products tended to be photographed on their own against a white background; the print was then retouched and further processed for printing. Ruff emphasized this extremely elaborate preparation and image processing—the analog counterpart of digital processing with “Photoshop”—by coloring individual areas of the digitized images with purposefully set colors, similar to retouching.
In 2000, Thomas Ruff acquired several boxes containing roughly 2,000 glass negatives dating from the 1930s. They constituted the image archive of the former Rohde & Dörrenberg company in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel which manufactured machines and machine parts. The photos were originally produced for the company catalog and present its entire product line. In order to make it easier to cut out the object in question, which back then was done by hand, the products tended to be photographed on their own against a white background; the print was then retouched and further processed for printing. Ruff emphasized this extremely elaborate preparation and image processing—the analog counterpart of digital processing with “Photoshop”—by coloring individual areas of the digitized images with purposefully set colors, similar to retouching.