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The absolute banality of Ruff against the subjects depicted. Some subjects: Skies littered with stars, explicit sex, people's unique and individual faces: all are given a treatment that is attempted to be at total remove, Ruff's almost struggle to render it boring. All the grandiose pomposity used to describe the "historically and photographically fascinating source material" is given what is akin to pressing ⌘I in photoshop. The measure of the means doesn't necessarily define the ends, but the gesture's simplicity, along with all its attendant "negativity," doesn't so much revitalize the source material, as the PR would imply, as it shows the source - as any other material - as manipulable by the slightest command to alter it indefinitely, completely alter it, at a whim be reduced to complete and utter inversion, and all the stupid simplicity of that.
see too: Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K.