For the first time, Photographic Objects traces important conceptual connections between the work of Thomas Ruff and that of a younger generation of artists. Against the backdrop of ongoing debates on the "nature of photography," Marcus Kramer has developed a new approach to pinpointing what distinguishes the photographic medium from all others.

The book's detailed illustrations offer an extensive overview of the work of Thomas Ruff, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Kelley Walker, and Spiros Hadjidjanos, while the theory postulated here forms a conceptual framework for the discussion of contemporary artistic practices.

The work of Thomas Ruff marks a paradigm change in photography: systematically and on an impressive level of aesthetic quality, the artist has for more than three decades been subjecting the medium of photography to a modernist analysis by introducing several formal innovations. One by one, Ruff has teased out basic parameters of the medium and their aesthetic interdependencies, taking photography beyond well-trodden paths. It's all the more remarkable, then, that exhibitions and the literature to date have tended to neglect these circumstances: up to now, the artist's work has repeatedly been presented and discussed exclusively in terms of its content and media-critical aspects.

The present examination focuses instead for the first time on the unique pictorial vocabulary Thomas Ruff has developed, which with its powerful and complex aesthetic demonstrates?while consistently reflecting on its medium?how the use of photography can be freed from its traditional patterns of application.

Thomas Ruff is one of the most internationally well known contemporary German photographers. Over the course of two dozen photography series, he has explored and defined the medium's limits like no other contemporary artist.

Since 1989, Ruff stopped taking and printing his own photographs in order to work with existing materials. His work is primarily concerned with questions that investigate the structure and content of the medium. Scientific images are the source material for all the photographs shown, and many of them were freely accessible via the internet. While Thomas Ruff's work for the stars series was limited to selecting details from photographs, he took a heavier hand in processing the source material in his new series: for the cassini and ma.r.s. series, Thomas Ruff utilised pictures from various NASA missions. He digitally retouched them, altered the colours, manipulated contrast and cropping. Ruff's colouration of the original realistic, black and white pictures gives them a new character: they become painterly, aesthetic pictures whose abstract beauty serves as a surface for our imaginations.

The catalog focuses specifically on four of Thomas Ruff's series: the stars series, produced between 1989 and 1992, zycles from 2007, the cassini series from 2008/2009, and recent work from the ma.r.s. series, shown now for the first time in an institutional context. Individual works from other series that explore a similar theme are also shown.