Thomas Ruff: Image Ventriloquism and the Visual Primer

Thomas Ruff, exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Gallery, 2017

‘Image Ventriloquism and the Visual Primer’ is an essay written by David Campany for the book Thomas Ruff, published on the occasion of an exhibition of Ruff’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 21 September 2017 – 21 January 2018

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Whitechapel Gallery (9 Sept. 2017)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 085488260X
• ISBN-13: 978-0854882601

Publisher’s description:

For over thirty years Thomas Ruff has approached every genre of photography and coolly reinvented it. One of the greatest artists to use photography in the 21st century, Ruff came of age in the 1980s alongside Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, in what was to become known as the Düsseldorf School. Creating photographic images on the scale of history paintingbut with a cool hyperrealism, Ruff moves from the micro to the macro, from portraying friends to picturing the cosmos. He also oscillates between the laboratory and the archive, experimenting with digital technologies to create photograms with virtual objects and rescuing discarded press photographs to reveal lost histories. Unlike many other publications on his work which assess Ruff’s work series by series, this catalogue provides a thematic exploration of his output including portraits, disasters, sky and cityscapes, internet nudes, photograms, manga images, magnetically generated images and found photographs. Lavishly illustrated in colour, and with new essays by David Campany and Sarah E. James, the book will also focus on texts and source material from Ruff’s rich archive.

NB: There are four alternative covers to this publication.

 

Image Ventriloquism and the Visual Primer

 David Campany

The profusion of pictures generated by the advent of photography, and multiplied by the mass media, has presented great possibilities and challenges for art. For over a century now, many different artists have felt compelled to chart the vast and generalized image culture of their times. The list would include figures as diverse László Moholy-Nagy, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, John Baldessari, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Martha Rosler, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mishka Henner and Thomas Ruff. Each has been fascinated with, and often troubled by, what images are and what our engagement with them can be. Aesthetic, psychological, and ideological, this troubled fascination has also led to difficult questions about the relations between art, technology and popular culture.

At first glance, Thomas Ruff’s four-decade engagement with the photographic image appears remarkably varied. It runs from formal and carefully crafted photographs of domestic interiors, to the appropriation and re-presentation of old new photographs; from highly detailed portraits made with a large format camera, to blow-ups of low resolution image files found online; from the slow and considered photography of urban buildings, to the manipulation of images beamed back from the surface of Mars; from resolutely analogue photographic practices to computer generated images that stretch the definition of photography to breaking point.

Given this range, it is tempting to dwell on the apparent split in Ruff’s work between his direct use of a camera to make photographs, and the selecting and reworking of found photographic images that now preoccupies him. A split, one might say, between making ‘images of the world’ and exploring ‘the world of images’. Or, between venturing out with a camera and sitting in front of a computer. Such a split seems to follow the familiar distinction between ‘photographers’ and ‘artists using photography’. This distinction is often invoked to describe how the circumspect and critical engagement with the medium by Pop and Conceptual Art, for example, was different from photography made by those with a deeper attachment to their medium.  In truth however, the distinction has always been too emphatic. It presumes that one has to be either suspicious of photography, or have affection for it; that one either operates a camera, or operates uponphotographs.  Ruff does both, and more While while his means may have changed a great deal, his ends have remained consistent: to produce a provocative and generous guide, for himself and others, to photography at large.

Even in his earliest works, Ruff seemed less concerned with self-expression than with adopting protocols from the given fields of ‘applied’ or ‘professional’ photography. His first major series, Interiors (1979-1983), which showed the homes of his friends and family, played the endearing charm of the neatly made beds and clean kitchens of orderly petit bourgeois German domesticity against the equally restrained manner Ruff used to document them. Even the titling of the images was impersonal: a number followed by a letter.

In the subject matter and the photographic approach, there is conformity to unspoken standards. Calm, serious and anonymous. Any competent photographer could have made these pictures, although only Thomas Ruff did. So much of photography is to do with the choice of motif.

It is worth noting that Ruff’s reference point in the making of the Interiors was the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and Walker Evans (1903-1975). Atget had found a way to make open and unforced images that could be useful to anyone who needed them (interior designers, town planners, geographers, commercial illustrators) while pursuing his own idiosyncratic path in a rapidly modernizing Paris.  Impressed by Atget’s sensibility, the American Evans also favoured the restraint of the medium’s established vernaculars. He taught himself to assume the exacting standards of architectural and industrial photography, but he could also mimic the amateur snapshot. Ever the chameleon, Evans even appropriated found images for his own purposes, something Ruff himself would do soon enough.[i] The point to be understood here is that there is an important continuity in modern photographic art between making pictures according to given conventions, and the commandeering of pre-existing imagery.[ii] Both are forms of what could be called image ventriloquism.

When Ruff turned to photographing the friends that had been absent from the Interiors, all personal insight and psychological depth was put aside once again in favour of plain neutrality. The resulting series, simply titled Portraits, appeared to be a more technically precise version of the generic identity card photo. Calm, serious, and anonymous. Stepping outside to photograph the buildings and environments in which Ruff and his friends were living, he assumed the clear and rectilinear style that can be traced back via Atget and Evans to the skilled technician photographers of the late 1800s. Calm, serious and anonymous.

The character of Ruff’s first three series, Interiors, Portraits and Houses, stems from an acceptance of the sober optics of the camera. But it also accepts that viewers can never be so neutral, never as dispassionate as a glass lens. They will always bring interpretations and associations. What is calm, serious and anonymous becomes disarming, suggestive and enigmatic, especially in the space of art. “You see,” said Walker Evans, “a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.”[iii]. The context of art will estrange the photographic document, making thinkable the transparency it assumes in use.

Ruff’s work belongs to that strain of modernist photography that embraced the relation between authored images made as art and images made elsewhere in the culture. This acceptance is precisely what made the medium so vital within modernism. Photography operated at the intersection of so many frames of reference – art, design, documentary, anthropology, sociology, politics, science, law, fashion, architecture and so on. It triumphed as a modern art by walking the tightrope between art and non-art, uselessness and use, expression and document.

For argument’s sake, let us say this new relation between art and non-art began in 1917, exactly a century ago. That is the year Marcel Duchamp submitted for exhibition a factory-made urinal as an artwork, while Paul Strand’s documentary-style street photographs were published in Alfred Steiglitz’s photographic art magazine Camera Work. The urinal (soon lost, but not before Steiglitz had photographed it for posterity) and documentary-style photography both challenged traditional notions of art because in their different ways they left so much to choice, chance, generic production and the anonymity of everyday life. Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ really could be plumbed in, and pissed in. A viewer would sense that immediately, with the force of a snapshot, as Duchamp put it.[iv] Strand’s photos really could be taken off those high art pages, captioned in a newspaper and made to function as a report. In both cases a strong contextual claim had to be made for their status as art. The works themselves couldn’t make that claim because they didn’t have the ‘look of art’, and that was part of their point.

That ambiguity came to characterize so many of the important developments in the vanguard inter-war photography of the Americas and Europe. While some of this work was exhibited, most often it was made for the pages of journals and books. Indeed, it was the book form that allowed photography the most ambiguity and the most play between discourses.  For example, we are still unclear as to exactly who bought August Sander’s now much celebrated a book of sixty photographs of German citizens, Antlitz der Zeit (The Face our Our Time) 1929, or what they might have made of it. Were those portraits to be understood as art, as reportage, as sociology, as a study of gesture, as an affirmation or as a pointed intervention into the fraught question of German identity at that time? All readings were possible, legitimate and probably mixed together. The subsequent canonising of such radically multivalent work within the history of art, or indeed the history of photography, only serves to obscure this crucial point.

Thomas Ruff inherited this appreciation of photography’s multivalence through his tutors, Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose own photography of industrial architecture could be interpreted in so many ways.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s it chimed with the anti-expressionism and effacement of artistic labour that was typical of Minimalist sculpture and Conceptualism (an early book of the Bechers’ work was even titled Anonyme Skultpuren, or Anonymous Sculpture), but it could never be reduced to that. Their photographs also function as an important social record of buildings types that are now uncommon in post-industrial Europe and North America. When the buildings themselves disappear, the photographs stand as symbolic monuments, and even as allegories of anonymous industrial labour.[v]

Ruff has adopted and adapted many familiar image forms, always with a distinctive understanding of this multivalence of photography. Indeed, looked at as a whole, his work can be understood as a descendent of the visual primer, that genre of more or less pedagogical publications and exhibitions that appeared between the 1920s and the 1950s as guides to the modern image environment.[vi] Admittedly, Ruff has shown little of the utopian zeal that defines the classic examples of the primer, such as László Moholy-Nagy’s Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, photography, film) 1925, or Werner Gräff’s Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!) 1929. [vii] Ruff has no faith in the powers of photography to break the shackles of traditional painting to forge a bold modernist aesthetic; no commitment to the camera as a means of universal communication beyond language; and Ruff certainly makes no connection between photography and emancipatory politics. Neither does he engage in the kind of overt critique of the mass media to be found in the more explicitly political primers such as Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles 1929, or Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel (War Primer) 1955, both of which used language to undermine the dominant uses of photography by the populist press.[viii]

Like Evans, Atget, Sander and the Bechers before him, Ruff has resisted naïve excitement about the potential of photography and about its social ills. Instead his work maintains the underlying ambiguity and enigma that is the essential condition of all uncaptioned images. Yet, despite this air of non-committal play the root impetus of the primer is still very much present in Ruff’s oeuvre. A catalogue or survey exhibition is likely to feel like a careful but unforced tour of contemporary visual culture, with photography’s genres, categories and technologies laid out for inspection. Sometimes it is the simple recontexualising of chosen image forms that is enough. The Stars and Newspaper Photos, for example, work in a similar way to the re-presented media images found in the panels of Gerhard Richter’s epic and ongoing Atlas (1962-), or the image appropriations of Richard Prince. At other times, it is Ruff’s manipulation or post-production of imagery that introduces a critical distance on the source material. His Nudes and jpeg series reprocess online porn and news images in ways that estrange and make them thinkable. Even the gesture of printing and exhibiting images that were intended to exist primarily as immaterial online data shifts them from use to contemplation.

The digital technologies that make new image forms possible have also made older images available to us as never before. This is a profound aspect of present day photographic culture, and Ruff has been exploring it for a while now. It can sometimes seem as if the central role of the twenty-first century, or and least the central role of the Internet that is this century’s gift and curse, has been to make sense of the twentieth century. An enormous volume of images from the past weighs upon the contemporary imagination. The avant-garde arts of the twentieth century were able to push on at their notoriously breakneck pace because their recent and distant past could be so easily ignored or forgotten, or it wasn’t known about in the first place. Neither was the depth of artistic practices taking place elsewhere on the globe. Illustrated catalogues were few and far between, museums were less plentiful, magazines came and went, and international exchange was limited. A great deal of modern artistic progress was built on erasure and ignorance. (We should note just how many of the recent survey exhibitions about the art of the last century have been motivated by discoveries of precedents and parallels that ask us to rethink what we thought we knew).

Today, the twentieth century and its various modernisms are being archived in unimaginable detail. Meanwhile image archives of all kinds and are mined, revisited, recuperated, and brought back from near oblivion like old negatives dusted off, to be digitally scanned and repurposed. Through the Internet we are faced with the task of making sense of the enormity of the last century – its achievements, its failures, its blind spots, its art and its everyday life.[ix] And in the midst of this abundance of the past, we are discovering that the history of photography, within art and outside of art, is far richer and more complex than was ever imagined.

Clearly Ruff’s very deep interest in the image world preceded the Internet.  His Stars series, which was derived from images acquired from the European Southern Observatory archive, was begun in 1989. Of course, what’s striking about this series is that one cannot tell quite when they were made (and their temporality is further complicated by the fact that the light from the distant stars in those images may well have been travelling since before photography was invented). The Newspaper Photos (1990 -1991) is a series comprising 400 re-photographed halftone images from the collection of 2500 that Ruff had clipped from newspapers over the previous decade.  It is clear that Ruff was figuring out his own relation to the way mass media images communicate, and fail to communicate coherently when deprived of their captions and functions.

Media scrapbooks have been a staple of artists’ development since the 1920s, the decade in which the illustrated press expanded so rapidly. As Colin MacCabe put it in his biography of Jean-Luc Godard: “In a world in which we are entertained from cradle to grave whether we like it or not, the ability to rework image and dialogue … may be the key to both psychic and political health.” [x]  Have your way with images, or they will have their way with you. But looking back from the perspective of the Internet, it’s clear that the young Thomas Ruff’s version of the media scrapbook, The Newspaper Photos series, was one of the very last that could legitimately dwell over crude newsprint imagery without looking nostalgic. The ‘keys to psychic and political health’ were soon to be lost, somewhere online.

Back in 1958 the Italian writer Italo Calvino published ‘Adventure of a Photographer’ a short story about a man trying to come to terms with what, if anything, we might be able to say photography ‘really’ is. This man observes others on holiday with their cameras. He looks at endless images in the printed media. He photographs his girlfriend. He sets up a darkroom. He starts re-photographing his images, along with images from newspapers and magazines. And in the process, he wonders: “Perhaps true, total photography […] is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.”[xi]

At the close of the last millennium, it appeared as if that dream of a ‘true, total photography’, of a universal archive, an ultimate collection, might be realized in the acquisition, digitizing and merging of pre-existing archives. With the original prints and negatives dumped or stored away, these agglomerated mega-deposits of pure data might manifest through the Internet. This was once the fantasy of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, who was an early player in the buying up and monetizing of old photo archives. In 1995, he was in the process of commissioning large electronic screens for his new Seattle home that would be linked to his commercial image library, Corbis.  “If you’re a guest”, he wrote in his book The Road Ahead, “you’ll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like – presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, picture of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.”[xii]

Of course, such images alone will tell you very little, unless you know about them already. The notion that modern history will be written in photographs is deeply problematic, although it is an often-repeated cliché. Famously, László Moholy–Nagy had claimed as early as 1927 that the illiterate of the future would be those who didn’t understand photography.[xiii] That wasn’t so much true as a reflection of Moholy-Nagy’s idealized faith in the modern image utopia.  Photographs show but they don’t explain. You can photograph a man sneezing but the image will never tell you how he caught the cold. Can we imagine dumping a pile of photos without words on the desks of schoolchildren? “There’s the history of the last century. Make of it what you will” Or dumping a second pile and saying: “There’s the history of photography”? While of those images invoked by Bill Gates has its own significance, the levelling equivalence of his flat list – mere data to be summoned into images at will – seems queasily banal. And the presumption that one corporation might own “any image you like” is troubling to say the least. But two decades on from Gates’s update of Moholy-Nagy’s fantasy this is almost where we are, and it doesn’t feel remotely utopian. As the artist and writer Victor Burgin has pointed out: “We are rarely allowed to own the memories we are sold. When two thirds of global copyrights are in the hands of six corporations the capacity to rework one’s memories into the material symbolic form of individual testament and testimony is severely constrained.”[xiv]

It is against this scenario, in which images are tethered by almost nothing but corporate money at their abstract location online, that Thomas Ruff’s ‘post-internet’ projects begin to make sense. Or more accurately, they begin to dramatize the difficulties we now face in making sense of our image world.

In the Negatives series (2015), historical photographs bought online are scanned and tonally reversed, the warm brown of the original albumin prints turning to cool blues. For the press++ series (2016), Ruff picked over the vast archives of old photographs that are being sold off by American newspapers on eBay, for as little at $9 each. Which to choose? From the unimaginable array, Ruff selected a group of news photos related directly to the heyday of space exploration. Those images, and that period of the last century, symbolize both the utopian drama of technological emancipation and the dangerous tensions of the Cold War that had prompted the ‘space race’ to begin with. That moment also marked the beginning of the displacement of photography from the centre of culture by television.  Onto his enlargements of these overpainted photographs (retouching didn’t begin with Photoshop), Ruff superimposes the notations found on the backs of the original prints: the names of the photographer and press agency, captions, and publication dates. In the era of digital news photographs, this ‘metadata’ now has to be carried in the title of the photographer’s JPEG file.

The bounty of physical, material images available online is one of the ironies of the Internet, which we so often associate with all that is immaterial. But new communications technologies do not simply replace old ones; they reinvent them but on their own terms. It is the very immateriality of screen images that has re-attuned audiences to the specific qualities of objects, particularly printed objects, be they photographs or books.

Of all of Ruff’s post-internet work, it is perhaps his jpeg series from 2004 that has received the widest attention. We cannot know simply by looking at the images where exactly Ruff found them. Certainly, they come from Ruff’s archive, from his own accumulated cache. But they might also come from other archives. He searched for the images online, often following links from one site to another, ‘surfing’ as we all do. But what does it mean so say that an image is ‘from the Internet’? Is the Internet an archive? In one sense it is, but it is too general a term. It is not so much an archive as an archive of archives. In this sense Ruff’s jpegs belong to at least three archives: his own, the Internet, and the specific archives accessed online. They may also belong to a fourth archive, perhaps an original analogue archive that has been digitized and made available electronically. And they may belong to a fifth – that of collective memory, and to a sixth – the viewer’s individual memory. And so on.

Given that all images online and most images made for contemporary printed matter exist as digital files it is surprising how few of them ever wish to address the fact that they exist as masses of electronic information that take visual form as pixels. Ruff has done a great deal to introduce into photographic art what we might call an ‘art of the pixel’, allowing us to contemplate at an aesthetic and philosophical level the basic condition of the electronic image. Of course, he does this not by showing us the images on screens but by making large scale photographic prints, blowing them up far beyond any realist resolution. This might be the first time some of these images have ever taken a material form.

The pixel has replaced the grain of photographic film. Chemically-based photography developed an art of grain quite early on, especially through reportage.  In the 1940s and 50s, graininess took on the connotations of ‘authenticity’, coded as a kind of limit to which the photographer and the equipment had been pushed. Perhaps the most famous example is Robert Capa’s group of pictures from the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach during the Second World War. The indistinct haziness of the images was treated as a sign of the sheer urgency of the situation and of human endurance (even though Capa’s grain was actually the result of the subsequent hasty processing and drying of the negatives by an assistant back in the darkroom).  In the post-war decades, photographers used grain as an expressionistic device to speak of limits of one kind or another – personal, aesthetic, technical, artistic. We see it in the work of everyone from William Klein and Robert Frank to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Today it is almost a cliché but for a while at least grain became a sign of a virtuous materiality of the image and of the virtuously embodied photographer out in the world.

Pixels are quite different. They are grid-like, repetitive. When we glimpse pixels we do not think of authenticity. Instead, the pixel represents a cold technological limit, a confrontation with the virtual and bureaucratic order that secretly unites all images in a homogenous electronic continuum, whether they are holiday snapshots or military surveillance.

It is notable that many of the images Ruff worked on for this jpeg series are depictions of unpredictability. Water, fire, smoke, steam, explosions, ruins. These are all phenomena that cannot be mapped or modelled in their detail. They are in a sense wild and anarchic, and this is in part what makes such things so photogenic. When we see them through Ruff’s crude but often beautiful grids of pixels, we switch from looking at figuration to abstraction and back again. The result is a great tension or drama, and it is tempting to see in this drama something of the character of contemporary life, with its great forces of bureaucratic rationality and irrationality.[xv]

Any computer based engagement with images will eventually lead either to abstraction, or to the production of virtual forms, or both. Ruff has accepted this logic, but in ways that allow the spectres of photography’s past to haunt his work. We can see this most clearly in his photogram series, from 2012. Traditionally speaking, a photogram is a more or less abstract image made in the darkroom by putting objects or shapes between a light source and a sheet of photosensitive paper.  The shadows of these objects block the light, but the because the paper responds negatively (reversing the tones), that shadows appear as lighter shapes on darker backgrounds. Colour photograms are possible too.  For the inter-war avant-gardes, the photogram held a special place. It signalled that photography could have a legitimate affinity with the various forays into abstraction taking place in the other arts, particularly painting and sculpture. And, in its elemental reductions, the photogram also embodied a ‘truth to materials’ that was a cornerstone of modernist art.

Thomas Ruff has made his photograms entirely within the virtual environment of a computer. Modelling 3D objects and light sources, has been was able to manipulate all the elements to a far greater degree than in a traditional darkroom.  The quality and direction of light, the distance from the light source to the ‘paper’, the nature and position of the ‘objects’ and the way in which the ‘paper’ responds to the light can all be dreamt up and tweaked incrementally. Moreover, Ruff has been able to print his final images at any scale, whereas the dimensions of the traditional photogram are set by the choice of paper size.

Given that Ruff could make is photograms look like anything at all, what was it that determined his choices? It’s clear that his starting point was the kinds of forms that were familiar to him from the classic photograms of the modernist masters such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. We can make out geometric shapes and allusions to organic matter, machine parts, utensils, discs, rods, paper strips and prisms.  While it is tempting to think that these are the kinds of images Moholy-Nagy or Man Ray might make if they were they were working today, this misses the point. Ruff’s photograms are a testament to the grip that modernist image making still has on the contemporary photographic imagination, even when that imagination is attempting to go beyond what we think of as photography.

Image technology may be genuinely new, but we never are. We always have to contend with the habits we have picked up and the images we have accumulated, whether they were made last week or a hundred years ago.  Ruff’s photograms, like all his other series, are not so much expressions of creative will as demonstrations of what’s possible, of where we stand in relation to images, and of what we have come to expect of them. A visual primer for his era, and ours.

[i] See for example Walker Evans’ work for the journalist Carleton Beals’ political exposé The Crime of Cuba, published in 1933.  Into his sequence of poetic Havana street shots, Evans planted anonymous press photographs of murdered dissidents and political prisoners which he had sources in a local newspaper office.

[ii] It is worth noting here that the first appearance of Atget’s photographs in the context of art came about when Man Ray acquired several prints from the photographer for use in the journal La Revolution Surréaliste, the first of which appeared in 1926.  All of these images were refunctioned, retitled and not credited to Atget.

[iii] Walker Evans interviewed by Leslie Katz, Art in America, March-April, 1971.

[iv] Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. A typographical version by Richard Hamilton of Duchamp’s Green Box, trans. George Heard Hamilton, Lund Humphries, London 1960, unpag.

[v] It is often said that any photograph becomes interesting after a generation, and it does so on the basis of its documentary value. This may well turn out to be the lasting legacy of the Bechers’ work, despite the fact that it has also been so central to the understanding of photography in art since the 1960s.

[vi] Of the many pedagogical exhibitions, the most influential was Film und Foto which debuted in Stuttgart in 1929 and toured continental Europe before going to Tokyo and Osaka in Japan. A smaller version was also presented in America.  With over 1200 photographs, plus films, Film und Fotoaimed to be an instructive survey of all aspects of life touched by the camera image, from art and design to the sciences. The closest example in the UK was the exhibition The Parallel of Art and Life, presented at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, in 1953.

[vii] László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925; Werner Gräff, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!), Berlin: Herman Reckendorf, 1929/

[viii] See Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929, published in English as Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972; Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel, Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 1955, published in English as War Primer, London: Libris, 1998.

[ix] I discuss this phenomenon in more detail in the essay ‘Now is Then is Now’, in Paul Luckcraft, ed., You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred, published by the Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2017.

[x] Colin MacCabe, Godard: a portrait of the artist at 70, London, Bloomsbury, 2003 p. 301.

[xi] Italo Calvino, ‘Adventure of a Photographer’ (1958), Difficult Loves, Mariner Book, 1985.

[xii] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Books, 1995, p. 257

[xiii] László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Die Fotografie in der Reklame’ (Photography in Advertising), Photographische Korrespondenz 63, 9 (September 1, 1927), p. 259.

[xiv] Victor Burgin, ‘Possessive, Pensive and Possessed’ (2006) in David Campany ed., The Cinematic, Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press, 2007, p.207.

[xv] I first discussed this idea in ‘Thomas Ruff: Aesthetic of the Pixel’, IANN magazine, no. 2, 2008.