Campany and Colberg’s reviews of Thomas Ruff’s ‘jpegs’.

Campany and Colberg’s reviews of Thomas Ruff’s ‘jpegs’.

The key points.

I couldn’t help but groan when I saw David Campany’s name. I have read articles of his before and am very well aware of his distinguished, respected and well decorated career. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that he loves nothing more than presenting his thoughts shrouded in a ‘smoke and mirrors’ style to deliberately present an ambiguous (or at best vague) idea of what he actually thinks. Presented in this manner, it is difficult to directly challenge anything he is saying, as nothing is transparent! This (for me) is borne out in our very own syllabus (page 32) Quote: “Campany uses the word ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘formal’. Although they’re similar there is a slight difference between the two terms:” …….. In his review for his photoblog ‘Conscientious’ Joerg Colberg sees Ruff’s work as just aesthetic, asking ‘what else is there?’ In my mind, Colberg is using the word ‘aesthetic’ to mean just that, whereas, Campany is clearly being more ambiguous with his use of the same word. ‘Formal’ as we have discovered earlier in our studies, pertains to the structure and composition of an image, whereas ‘aesthetics’ pertain to a love, beauty, feel or appreciation of an image, all things which are less tangible than ‘form’. For me, in this instance Campany is playing Devil’s Advocate and trying to present both the beauty and science of Ruff’s presentations. I think he would do better by splitting the two approaches into separate paragraphs (at the very least). There is nothing wrong with presenting two sides of an argument (AKA sitting on the fence……!) but I think that there should be a clear line of demarcation to be able to maintain a structured argument.

That said!

Campany believes that these images can be enjoyed on many levels, i.e. on a basic visual level or on a more thought-provoking level despite his use of the word ‘aesthetic’.

‘…. Is its potent ability to solicit individual and global responses that cannot be entirely reconciled’. Does he just mean that the images are divisive dependent upon the viewers’ nationality/religious belief etc? If so, this can be said of many images and is not dependant on photographic style/technique.

‘All photographic images come from archives’. I’m sorry to say that it’s significance is lost on me, but Campany spends a disproportionate amount of space on it.

‘…. Meaning emerges as much from comparison and contrast as from any individual image.’ A series of images can provoke greater depth of thought/investigation and subsequently greater understanding through comparison of works within a collective.

‘…. graininess took on the connotations of ‘authenticity’, coded as a kind of limit to which the photographer and the equipment had been pushed.’ Something that I’d never consciously thought about before, but is a bit of a realisation (Thank you Mr Campany)

Colberg’s first sentence throws down a gauntlet, but then quickly kicks it out of the ring, not to be discussed! Can Ruff’s work be considered photography or not? A fairly fundamental point surely!

“Ruff’s jpegs work amazingly well in book form. It is a rather large book, beautifully printed. For me, seeing the jpegs in the book actually works much better than seeing them as gigantic prints…..”. This flies in the face of Ruff’s premise regarding their (the images) ‘medium specificity’ Seeing them big, up close and in your face gives a better visual sense of the abstraction he is trying to achieve.

‘the amount of detail in the images was actually not large enough to justify the sizes shown in the gallery’ He understands the concept but feels that for it to fully work, there needs to be more detail to do justice to the technique. Not having seen them ‘in the flesh’, I am unable to comment, but feel there is mileage in a discussion about his point!

The concept lacks any depth beyond what is presented (which he feels has ‘tremendous beauty’). There is no apparent thought process/journey beyond the initial idea, despite there being a lot of allusion. Not all ‘journeys’ need to be long to be worthy of merit! Ruff has created a genre, it maybe for another generation to take up the mantle and develop it further. If his beef is about there being a lot of allusion to something that doesn’t exist, then that maybe so, and just.

Ruff hasn’t actually discovered anything new, low res images on the web have always produced interesting results, but he has taken on and maybe created a ‘genre’ that never existed before. I think this is a fair point, but what he has done with his thought process is found a ‘medium specificity’ to display these images in a way that may have been overlooked, and by doing so has brought a new way of seeing almost anything which comprises of pixels!

Below are a couple of very good examples of Ruff’s work, and from these I can see quite clearly why they need to be very large to be fully appreciated.