HUO: I remember that in our very first conversation, when I spoke with you, Katharina Fritsch and Martin Honert in the 80s, you were the one who helped me rediscover Ruthenbeck. And, you know, if you think about the upside-down furniture and the way he used quotidien or very banal objects – he of course was a photographer who photographed all his friends. Was he inspiring for you?
TR: It was as you described. It was really strange for us that Ruthenbeck was not so well known. He was well known in Germany and very much respected, but not outside of Germany. He was inspiring because – and perhaps this isn’t right, but I think he had the spirit to touch in his sculptures, they were floating sometimes.

HUO: Beyond gravity?
TR: Yes, in a way. I think he was also perfect in explaining the very simple phenomena of perception.

HUO: One thing that is so fascinating in your exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery is that it shows this amazing transition which both of our generations have experienced: the transition from analogue to digital. It’s very different from the kids who grow up now, who are literally born with digital, because we have one foot in each. In the exhibition I found that very moving, very powerful. When you began, it was clearly a very analogue age, and then at this certain moment the digital enters through these nudes at the beginning – the jpegs – but also through the drama of 9/11. How did the digital age change your work? Long before that I remember you were the very first person who explained to me, before the invention of the World Wide Web, that you had a laboratory somewhere in Switzerland I think, which could remove trees in front of your buildings. And that was a ‘wow’ moment, it was totally early days. Was it really a tree removal which was your first experience in digital?
TR: Yes. At that time I was working analogue, and I really believed photography captured reality. Maybe some things could be altered in the darkroom, but in 87 I thought, “OK, this digitalisation of photography is just a new tool, like a new lens.” So I used that new lens by doing retouchments, altering images with the help of digital software. At that time I did not yet realise the consequences of the World Wide Web – that was too far away. Only later on I understood that it was not only the digitalisation, but also the new ways of distribution through the Internet that influenced photography. With the digitalisation there’s a shift in the structure of photography. A lot of people are looking at jpegs, but they are not aware they are looking at artefacts that show up when you compress an image to make it smaller to send it faster via the Internet. So, at a certain point, I started my investigation on this structure of the digital photograph. In a way it was a kind of continuation of the practice and technologies that I did before with the star photographs and with the night photographs, with the andere portraits, where I did that in an analogue way, but already shifting to images that don’t come from, let’s say an artistic world, but from a more scientific or military world.

HUO: The military connection is also present with the NASA images, and you had just started them when I interviewed you last time. Could you tell me a little bit about the evolution of that NASA series? The images of Mars are very striking, you also said that NASA is one of your favourites online, it’s also one of my favourite Instagram [accounts].
TR: [Laughs] Yes. The ma.r.s series primarily showed up for private reasons. I was just looking at the latest results of the discovery, the closest discovery of Mars, and I suddenly found these really high resolution images – I could not believe they put them online. I downloaded those files to look at the surface of the planet, and I started playing around with them. The original source images are black and white, they are long scans of the surface. I started colouring the landscape, just because I wanted to see them in colour. At the very beginning the colour I used was like photographs from Mars that I had seen before but, in working on that, I started using colours that are wrong or false. I wrote to NASA [to ask] why they only did black and white photographs and only small straps in colour, and they told me it’s a question of data – if they did the whole thing in colour the file would be too big for transmitting down to Earth. The second thing I asked them was, “Are your colour photographs photoshopped?” And then they explained to me, “Mr Ruff, no, they are not photoshopped, they are processed,” [laughs] which for me is the same. At a certain point, I thought that colouring space doesn’t make sense, because what our human eye sees is only a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and those waves go from one nanometre to one hundred metres, and maybe aliens have a totally different art of perception. So I said, “Now I’ll colour those photographs for aliens.”

HUO: [laughs] And is the series continuing? In a way you always work in series, like many artists before you, like Warhol. Do your series ever come to an end? Could you re-start doing the portraits? Are the series really finite, or are they potentially infinite?
TR: Working on a series is a kind of artistic statement. To prove that my statement is right, which cannot be done with one photograph, I have to take, let’s say five, ten, or more. If you want to explain mankind to an alien, for example, you cannot show one photograph, you at least need two: one of a male and one of a female. And probably two portraits can not explain the variety and diversity of the whole of mankind. So I really thought that I need to make 100 portraits because in a way everybody is unique, so it should be a large amount of portraits. Concerning the end of the series, I would say the series is dying, maybe it’s dying of disinterest. When I’m working, I’m not only working on one series, maybe there’s a series that I’ve been working on for a couple of years, then there’s a new series that just showed up, and maybe I have an idea for something new, but I haven’t yet created an image. So yes, at a certain point the respective series are dying away.

HUO: And more recent series that you didn’t discuss in our last interview, are Zycles and Cassini. They draw from science. I remember, again in 86 when I met you, we spoke about [Karl] Blossfeldt and you’ve always had an interest in scientific photography, or photography as a science. And Zycles are based on 3D aspects of scientific curves. They look very futuristic but they are also very old, because they come from old books, electromagnetic scientific books.
TR: The Zycles came to mind when I saw a couple of prints of these magnetic fields, and I thought, “These are two-dimensional drawings, but of course the magnetic fields are three-dimensional.” So I just wanted to create a kind of three-dimensional gravitational curve, and I did that with 3D software. Then, when I made these curves with my mathematical formulas, I could walk or virtually fly through these objects. But at the end, in a way, all I could do was take a conventional shoot of the details of those curves. The sources you mention are old-fashioned 19th century science drawings, but then I created these with the state-of-the art technology. Concerning Cassini, they are photographs of the rings and moons of Saturn. These were also black and white photographs, and I found them extremely beautiful in terms of composition, some of them really remind me of suprematistic compositions from the 1920s.

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