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Stars
1989 to 1992
Ruff’s childhood interest in astronomy re-emerged
in the late 1980s with his Stars series. Having acquired
many negatives of the night sky above Chile, from the archives of
the European Southern Observatory, he started to print large-scale,
and seemingly abstract, photographs of stars, galaxies and nebula.
Selecting details from the 29 x 29cm negatives Ruff divided them
into six categories, where the stars themselves were either in the
foreground, the background or were very remote, or the focus was
interstellar objects, the Milky Way or other galaxies. These images
present the viewer with a duality - it is obvious what the white
dots on a black background are but without expert knowledge, it
is impossible to read these as anything other than abstract pattern.
Therefore, for the viewer the shift in focus is from the subject
matter to the startling beauty and simplicity of the composition.
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