Interieurs

Interieurs collects photographs Thomas Ruff made as a student at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, quiet, precisely framed pictures of the modest apartments of family and friends in Germany's Black Forest region.

Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König and edited by Martin Germann, the 108-page hardcover reproduces the series in 48 color images and one black-and-white photograph, accompanied by text from the writer Thomas Bernhard. Made between 1979 and 1983 under Bernd Becher's tutelage, the photographs isolate rooms and furnishings with the same flat, deadpan objectivity Ruff would later bring to his portraits and star charts, capturing what he has called the "epitome of petite bourgeoisie" with neither irony nor sentimentality, even as the images register as a document of his own upbringing.

Ruff, born in 1958, went on to become one of the most influential photographers to emerge from the Becher school, moving between series, Portrats, Sterne, Nachte, Substrate, and jpegs, that each interrogate photography's claim to objectivity; Interieurs, his earliest sustained body of work, already stakes out that territory.