David Campany’s short essay “Thomas Ruff: Aesthetic of the Pixel” we are explores the collective context and analyses the state of photography through Ruff’s JEPG series. Ruff is heavily invested in found imagery and the qualities of the pixel as a form of making a photograph. The shifting patterns of the photographic process have allowed Ruff to create this bold body of work. This work is explicitly investigatory. Ruff is not looking to create any new images but looking at how the digital image has transposed within an online space and how that can be replicated in an offline context. The series explores this anonymous trove of imagery that is pushed to its representational limits. Degradation becomes a texture within the pictorial space and the audience engages with an image that is on the edge of being identifiable.
Campany’s essay introduces Ruff’s work through its engagement with mass culture. Campany identifies the first wave of mass media influencing art in dada and surrealist collage, when ‘illustrated magazine and cinema’ grew in popularity. A few decades later this same engagement was what drew artists to ‘Pop-Art’, Campany claims “for many artists, visiting the imagery produced by mass culture is a necessity. Adapting the images that surround us is a way of making sense or staying sane”. Our influence and assimilation to our surrounding cultural conditions drives our creative practices. It is no surprise that we would want to intercept the imagery of our culture, especially a culture that has an underlying obsession with image. But in an age where image has almost lost meaning in its abundance, it is series like Ruff’s that unpick and untangle the materiality of the digital image and force it upon an audience.
Campany suggests that all photography is subject to some sort of stage of the archival process. Every image taken contributes to an archive of some sorts. “The standardisation of cameras and film formats, the standardisation of printed matter, the standardisation of the family album, the picture library, the computer image file, the press agency and even the modern art gallery – these are all archival forms of, and for, the photographic image”. The internet seems to have accelerated this process on an unprecedented level. Images of everything are instantly searchable and accessible, but also the image online has begun to breakdown. The JPEG format of archive diminishes quality in favour of storage space. The constant repurposing, downloading, re uploading and embedding of images further diminishes image quality. These are the images that Ruff uncovers and collects. The are a documentation of his own journey through the internet, he follows links through this digital space, creating paths that uncover humanity’s endeavour through nature. This interlaces images of picturesque landscape, with human achievement and the most detrimental of all war. His process is to enlarge these images on a gigantic scale in order to emphasise any degradation and to force the materiality into the context of the work.
In Campay’s essay we are reminded of our presumptions that the aesthetic of grainy film often equated to authenticity. An effort was usually made to reduce graininess form an image but it was a quality of an image that brought out the truth of the image. The audience could almost feel the light hitting the piece of celluloid to create the image, and the grain of an image became its hallmark. The same thing can not be said for the degradation of a digital image. Pixelation definitely does something to our reaction to an image but claiming authenticity doesn't seem to be an immediate response. “The pixel represents a cold technological limit, a confrontation with the virtual and bureaucratic order than secretly unites all images in a homogenous electronic continuum, whether they are holiday snapshots or military surveillance”. The pixel is unpredictable, is lack of surface seems to advocate a lack of trust. Confronted with Ruff’s images we are exposed to the extreme end of this digitalisation. Of course efforts to create a highly polished digital image can become a true and accurate representation. Yet it is the existence of this perplexing imagery, that is embedded in the interface of the internet, disenfranchises ourselves from a certain sense of reality that feels comfortable. The reality that Ruff’s jpegs come from feels very unwelcoming and bitterly harsh. It is a reality that is trapped between digitalisation, corruption and a strive for representation but at the same time the images reverberate notions of the internet, something that is so fundamental and so entangled with our lives.