Thomas Ruff Quotes

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.

Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.

My images are not images of reality, but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.

I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That's what is artistic about my photographs.

You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.

If things are the way they are, why should I try to make them look different?

I'm very old fashioned. I still believe in the image and the pictorial quality of the image. It seems that I'm still busy with a truth in photography.

There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.

The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.

I think it is an anarchistic idea to have information on the front and the back. Normally if you add information to information, you have more information.