Lichten

Lichten brings together five bodies of work spanning Thomas Ruff's career, from the late 1970s through 2014, organized around the shift from natural to virtual light in photography over the past three decades.

The book reproduces selections from Interiors (1979-1983), Stars (1989-1992) and Nights (1992-1996), together with work from his more recent Negatives (2014-) and Photograms (2012-2014) series, the latter a digitally generated simulation of the historic darkroom technique. It was published by Roma Publications to accompany simultaneous exhibitions at S.M.A.K. in Ghent and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, with texts by Philippe Van Cauteren, Robert Fleck, Gregor Jansen, Martin Germann and Valeria Liebermann.

Ruff, a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy, has built a body of work defined by systematic series that interrogate photography's claims to objectivity rather than photographing the world directly. Lichten traces that method across three decades, from analog interiors and night skies to his most recent digital experiments.