With images mostly obtained from the web by Ruff, Jpegs is a series of photographs that have been enlarged to exaggerate the pattern of pixels exploring colour and geometric patterns. In this series Ruff delves into the distribution and response of digital age images. 

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David Campany calls this series of work ‘photographic art’. He sees it as impartial yet beautiful - ‘his work seems cold and dispassionate, wilful, searching and perverse but at times surprisingly beautiful’. He uses the word ‘dramatise’ as a way of explaining how Ruff’s work has been adapted to make the viewer take on a new opinion of photography and what photography is. Campany states, ‘what is particular about Ruff’s work is its potent ability to solicit individual and global responses that cannot be entirely reconciled. It seems to belong to everybody and nobody and as a result we are neither free to look just as individuals nor to respond ‘collectively’ either’ - This suggests to me that Campany feels that this series of work was intended to separate peoples views and allow individuals to think in a new way about art and photography.

 

Campany also talks a lot about archives and how Ruff found a lot of images for Jpegs from the internet and he starts to question what an archive is and whether the internet is one and how many it contains. For me this was a little off topic. He then moves on to talk about the pixel, ‘Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image’. He states that pixels are ‘repetitive’ and ‘mechanic’ and says that ‘our response to the pixel is changing and we can measure something of that through Thomas Ruff’s JPEGS’.

David Campany’s review of JPEGS is somewhat contradictory. It seems to me that he can’t quite make up his mind on how he feels about the series of work but it is clear that he does not think of it as photography but as ‘photographic art’.

 

Joerg Colberg starts his review with the question of whether or not we can call JPEGS photography, ‘many people - especially adherents of photographic orthodoxy - will probably vehemently deny that most of Ruff’s recent work is actually photography’. Colberg quickly states that that is not what is important, what is more important is what the series does.

 

After seeing the series displayed in a gallery with the images enlarged Colberg says, ‘for me, seeing the jpegs in the book actually works much better than seeing them as gigantic prints in the Zwirner gallery setting where, well, there was that whiff of things being just a tad too pretentious’.

 

Colberg also talks about a feeling of unease with the work, ‘the tremendous beauty of some of the images notwithstanding, the concept itself seems to rely a bit too much on the technique itself. What else is there? Make no mistake, there is nothing wrong with producing beautiful images or images that are “just” beautiful. And everything would be fine if there hadn’t been so many attempts to convince me that in reality “jpegs” is more. What that “more” really is I never managed to find out’. For me this statement comes across as though Colberg is looking for a deeper meaning behind the series of photos that make up JPEGS that he is yet to have found.

 

Joerg Colbergs review is much easier to read than David Campany’s. He has a much more critical take on JPEGS whereas Campany seems to be a lot more technical and academically inclined. Both reviewers seem to be in two minds over the series but maybe that is what Thomas Ruff intended to happen with JPEGS.