id:			158991
accession number:	1995.204.6
share license status:	Copyrighted
url:			https://clevelandart.org/art/1995.204.6
updated:		2024-03-26 02:00:27.998000

"In a Dream...": Constellations, 1990. Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958). Chromogenic print; image: 48 x 32.1 cm (18 7/8 x 12 5/8 in.); paper: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Anonymous Donor and Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS 1995.204.6

title:				Constellations
title in original language:	
series:				"In a Dream..."
series in original language:	
creation date:			1990
creation date earliest:		1990
creation date latest:		1990
current location:		
creditline:			Anonymous Donor and Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS
copyright:			

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culture:	Germany, 20th century
technique:	Chromogenic print
department:	Photography
collection:	PH - German 20th Century
type:		Portfolio
find spot:	
catalogue raisonne: 

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CREATORS

* Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)  - artist
Thomas Ruff German, 1958- Thomas Ruff is one of a generation of German photographers, including Thomas Struth, Alex Hütte, Andreas Gursky, and Candida Höfer, whose work bears the influence of Bernd Becher, their instructor at Düsseldorf's Kunstakademie. Like Becher, Ruff confronts the viewer with optically precise photographs and adheres to a systematic methodology for posing and lighting his subjects so that their significance is conceptual, rather than actual. Ruff's larger-than-life color portraits of ordinary middle-class men and women typify this approach. Working with a zoom lens, he poses his subjects, sans makeup, before stark backdrops, lighting them frontally to deliberately invite comparisons with photo-booth ID card portraits, although Ruff's photographs are often up to 10 feet in height. Aggrandizing individuality, while simultaneously systematizing it, he creates complex portraits that allude to issues of power and control, and in particular, to photography's place within those systems. Ruff's images have been published in German Art of the Late '80s: Binationale (1988), Portraits: Das Portrait in der Zeitgenossischen Photographie (1989), and Aus Der Distanz (1991). He lives in his native Düsseldorf. A.W.
* Portfolio II published by Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS  - publisher

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measurements: Image: 48 x 32.1 cm (18 7/8 x 12 5/8 in.); Paper: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
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inscriptions:

	inscription:	Written in pencil on verso: "11h 00m /-75o [degrees] "; "11/25 1990 Thomas Ruff [signed]"
	translation:	
	remark:		

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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

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LEGACY EXHIBITIONS

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PROVENANCE

	Anonymous Donor
	date: 
	footnotes: 	
	citations: 	


	The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
	date: December 4, 1995
	footnotes: 	
	citations: 	


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RELATED WORKS

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CITATIONS

	Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. <em>Catalogue of Photography</em>. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.
	page number: 	Reproduced: P. 311
	url:		

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IMAGES