Thomas Ruff produced his Jpegs series without using a camera. Instead, he printed compressed electronic image files (jpegs), many of them downloaded from the Internet, at monumental scale. The series, which encompasses tranquil landscapes, scenes of war, and natural and man-made catastrophes, began with images of the September 11th terrorist attacks. To make this pixelated image of an erupting volcano, Ruff printed a low-resolution jpeg at a very large scale. At such size, the pixels—the building blocks of all digital images—are magnified to the point of breaking up the very image they compose. By foregrounding the repurposed photograph’s underlying structure and naming (msh for Mount St. Helens), Ruff calls attention to the ways digital images are constructed, circulated, and viewed today.
Content notification
Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.
Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.