Photographer Thomas Ruff, archaeologist of images

Photographs lie. This does not prevent them from being infinitely attractive. All the work of Thomas Ruff, heavyweight of contemporary photography, revolves around this idea: to unmask the artifice of photography and, in doing so, to find pleasure in making it and looking at it. By presenting seventeen of his series produced over the past forty years, the vast and fascinating retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne (MAMC) – the first dedicated to the German artist (64 years old) in France – shows the logic stubbornness of the artist, at the same time as it offers the neophyte a sensual vertigo for the eyes. Brilliant colors, unique shapes and huge formats breathe freely in the monumental building of the museum.

It is the negative, this so neglected matrix, which is at the center of Ruff’s subject

There is something to be disturbed about in the first room, which shows certain recent series: by their colors and their patterns, they paradoxically evoke the pioneers of photography, these “primitives” of the 19^e century. The curator of the exhibition, Alexandre Quoi, wanted to classify the series not chronologically, but according to the age of the process they tackle, offering the viewer a short history of photography, delivered by Professor Ruff. The artist, a great collector of photographs, has thus revisited the fascinating images of Jules-Etienne Marey (1830-1904), famous for having broken down movement, or those of Félix Bonfils (1831-1885), owner of a photo in Beirut and author of views of the Middle East.

Ruff is as much interested in the subject as in the support: it is the negative, this so neglected matrix, which is at the center of his subject. He reproduced the glass plates of Bonfils in such a way as to underline the important cracks and additions which affected these forgotten and neglected objects, adding like an additional layer of time to the ancient ruins represented on the images. Cracks that perhaps also evoke, in a poetic way, the fragility of a very Western vision of the world, at a time when photography accompanied colonial expansion.

unearthly glow

The next room unfolds time and plunges into the avant-gardes of the 1930s: Thomas Ruff here uses solarization invented by the surrealists Man Ray and Lee Miller, a process which, through a double exposure, halos the motifs of a supernatural glow, and photograms, these images produced without a camera, obtained by placing objects on sensitive paper. In both cases, the artist played with these techniques by revisiting them with the help of his digital magic wand. Large flowers were photographed and then processed using software that reproduces the effect of solarization, before being printed on old paper. And geometric shapes – which should be called “falsegrams” and not photograms, since there is neither object nor sensitive paper – were made by Ruff in a digital darkroom which allows him to extend the possibilities of the process. , adding color or allowing multiples… These large images hung on the wall have a paradoxical status: rooted in the history of photography and detached from it, they float in a strange temporal bubble. But their charm operates.

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