Jpegs: Thomas Ruff and the horror of digital photography | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 12, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 2040-3682
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3690

Abstract

This article analyses the aesthetics of digital compression as revealed in Thomas Ruff’s Jpegs series of photographs (2004–07). These images exhibit a poor standard of digital picture resolution fixed as large-scale, high-quality, lustrous C-type photographic prints. With reference to Vilém Flusser’s writing on photography, I argue that Ruff’s work discloses a ‘horror of digital photography’: a system of automated representation, which inverts our relationship to the photographic image.

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2023-01-24
2024-04-23
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