Thomas Ruff’s jpeg series, completed in 2007, expands images downloaded from the Internet to a large format scale, giving weight and magnitude to their individual pixels. By enhancing and accentuating the photos’ pixels, Ruff exposes the scaffolding of electronically generated photographs. Ruff's jpeg works are almost purely digital products, continuing the artist’s ceaseless exploration of the boundary between traditional photography and photography enabled by the digital age.

Photographer Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) is internationally acclaimed for his explorations of photography in serial works, portraits, and, most recently, digital images. Ruff was born in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany, and studied photography at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art with Bernd and Hilla Becher. He first received critical attention for his series Interiors, in which he photographed domestic spaces in West Germany, later followed by spare, somber portraits of friends that drew from the aesthetics of 1970s police photographs. Ruff began creating large-scale works in color in the 1980s, photographing building facades and printing them for display at monumental sizes. Ruff is well known for his experiments with altered and appropriated imagery in his work, which borrow material from newspapers, textbooks, pornography, public architecture, Japanese manga (comics), found images on the internet, and even his own previously photographed works. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, documenta IX, and the Tate Liverpool, among many other venues. Ruff currently lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Selected Museum Collections:
Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, Denmark
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Tate Modern, London, England