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.