Thomas Ruff

So today I read this article about Thomas Ruff and his project where he pixelates images. A little ways down the author asks why no one else has made "work dealing with the technological impact of digitisation on photography." Ruff says: "there are so many interesting photographers, but why don't they think about the structure of photography? They're young, they're curious, but they're not interested. So I had to do this work because no one else would."

Well, this inspired me. I've let the "pixel destruction" project get a little dusty and haven't really been working on it for the past 8 months. I think I'll start it back up again. I need to narrow down the scope of the project though, specifically what images I choose to "destroy" or appropriate. I've been using images important to the history of photography so far but I am definitely a landscape photographer and would like to somehow integrate or extend this from my previous bodies of work...


Ruff's images are mostly landscapes. He explains "the jpegs are divided into three or four categories: the one I started with was ‘catastrophes created by man,’ then ‘catastrophes created by nature.’ Then I added another category that included examples of nature coming back or conquering man-made creations."

I've thought about using images from my previous bodies of work and sending them through my machine to see what happens. I think this could be productive or at least put to good use images that would otherwise not be seen. I think the concept could also stem from the previous projects in that the images would have some element of Romance or Exploration- exploring the boundaries of what we've already discovered or alluding to what we might discover next... but then- it just becomes pixel garbage :)