Untitled from press++ series

Thomas Ruff’s series of works titled “press++,” utilizes archived media photographs as both source imagery and source object.  Ruff reproduced images of both the fronts and backs of the pieces (from various American archives, used over numerous decades, oftentimes still showing crop marks, comments, etc.) and then layered them to create new single-sided images.  Furthermore, the photos are mounted on aluminum and displayed on small artist-designed stands so as to illuminate the object-ness of these pieces. The pieces compress the archive photos’ images, subjects, contexts and histories to create new works that both celebrate and question the original photographs and their subsequent uses, all while leaving the new works’ final forms’ purpose open-ended.