THOMAS RUFF | PRESS++20.31

For his new press++ series, Thomas Ruff draws upon prints from press agency archives. Ruff scans both sides of these prints and digitally overlays them to create a photograph all his own, with the characteristic notations, crop marks, and stamps on the reverse now viewable on the image itself. Press prints are often very worn from constant handling and not credited to any photographer as they were not intended as fine art photographic works, rather for the rapid spread of news. Ruff elevates the entire object by rendering it on a monumental scale, thereby transporting it into the realm of fine art photography. Many of the works he has made thus far for press++ use images of flight, space travel, or utopian architecture. Based on the original notations visible on the print Ruff used to make the present lot, one can deduce that this is an image of a Royal Air Force bomber taken sometime in or around 1945, and likely captioned ‘Me and My Shadow’ in its original publication.