Photograms
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Works
Biography
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Photograms
Fascinated by photograms from the 1920s, Thomas Ruff decided to explore the genre and develop his own contemporary version of these camera-less photographs. Since the artist was disturbed by the limitations of analog photograms—an image can only be produced once and cannot be enlarged at will, and color is also not possible—he used a virtual darkroom to create a simulation of the direct exposure of objects on light-sensitive paper. In this, he could lay objects (lenses, rods, spirals, paper strips, spheres, and other things) generated by a 3D program on or over a sheet of digital paper, correct their position and, in some cases, expose them to colored light. This enabled him to control the projection of the objects on the background in the virtual space and print the image rendered by the computer in any size he wanted. In this way, he succeeded in transferring the idea and aesthetics of the pioneers of the “camera-less photography” of the 1920s to generate images with light into the twenty-first century using a technique appropriate to his own time.
News
Works
Biography
Bibliography
DE / EN
Photograms
Fascinated by photograms from the 1920s, Thomas Ruff decided to explore the genre and develop his own contemporary version of these camera-less photographs. Since the artist was disturbed by the limitations of analog photograms—an image can only be produced once and cannot be enlarged at will, and color is also not possible—he used a virtual darkroom to create a simulation of the direct exposure of objects on light-sensitive paper. In this, he could lay objects (lenses, rods, spirals, paper strips, spheres, and other things) generated by a 3D program on or over a sheet of digital paper, correct their position and, in some cases, expose them to colored light. This enabled him to control the projection of the objects on the background in the virtual space and print the image rendered by the computer in any size he wanted. In this way, he succeeded in transferring the idea and aesthetics of the pioneers of the “camera-less photography” of the 1920s to generate images with light into the twenty-first century using a technique appropriate to his own time.
