Thomas Ruff talks to Daniel Birnbaum - '80s Then - German photographer - Related article: Roe Ethridge '80s again - Interview

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: You were a student in photography at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the late '70s and early '80s. Was it clear from the start that you wanted to concentrate on photography, or were you also interested in other mediums?

THOMAS RUFF: No, no. I came from a small town in southern Germany and really had no idea about contemporary art. I wanted to be a photographer, and to me that meant traveling the world in search of great shots of beautiful people and beautiful landscapes. Naive as I was, I said to myself, the most beautiful of all photographs must be made at the Academy, where the beautiful paintings are painted. So without being at all interested in art per se, I applied for the photography class at Dusseldorf, and strangely enough I was accepted into Bernd Becher's class.

DB: He was a rather new professor at the Academy at that point, no?

TR: He started in 1976; I applied the following year.

DB: What were the '80s like in Dusseldorf?

TR: It was an active time; everyone I knew was busy doing something, mostly art or music. My friends either studied at the Academy or had jobs and played in punk bands. I wasn't involved in the music scene myself, but I knew many people who were. We all went to the same bars.

DB: Dusseldorf, of course, became a very important center for photography in the '80s, and the Bechers and their photography class played a crucial role in this development.

TR: I think the success of the Dusseldorf photographers in the art world has to do with the precision with which we use our medium. Since World War II, photography has been taught in many places in Germany, but there are only a few schools where it was taught in a noncommercial, artistic way. Essen was such a place for a few years, but it never became as influential as the Becher class, in which the German tradition of 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit was taken seriously. We worked with large-format cameras and sharp images. There were a few specific subjects that seemed destined to play a central role in this kind of photography, primarily architecture. The Bechers' first students worked this out very rigorously: Thomas Struth, with his views of streets from all over the world; Axel Hutte, also with architectural images; and of course Candida Hofer, with her interiors.

DB: One gets the impression of a rather tight clique of artists working together. Is there such a thing as a Dusseldorf School?

TR: There was never really a group. Struth was in New York on a stipend when I started my studies. I had little contact with Hutte, who was already a senior, The only photography student I was close to was Candida Hofer. Most of my friends at art school were in other classes, for instance Gerhard Richter's painting or Klaus Rinke's sculpture classes. Also, Bernd and Hilla Becher were very busy with their own projects and weren't exactly hanging around the Academy all day with us students. The whole thing was much more relaxed. You could reach them over the phone if you needed them; otherwise they would leave you alone. Sometimes I would visit them at their house. Naturally you would discuss things with both, even though officially Bernd was the professor. But when I think of those days I think of students like Katharina Fritsch, Harald Klingelholler, and Thomas Schutte just as much as people in the photography department.

DB: How would you explain the sudden success in the '80s of photography in the art market?

TR: Well, one quite prosaic answer is that we offered the right thing at the right moment. Collectors and dealers were looking for a new product. After the emergence of the Neue Wilde painters in the late '70s, it took six or seven years for a new group of artists to attract attention. First there was a kind of sculpture boom in Dusseldorf, with artists such as Reinhard Mucha, Schutte, Klingelholler, and Klaus Jung. And then, with some hesitation, dealers and collectors started to get interested in the kind of photography that my generation was producing. After the paintings of the Neue Wilde, people were looking for something more objective.

DB: I presume it was more or less the same scene in Cologne, as it's so close to Dusseldorf?

TR: No. Cologne was really developing more and more into a party town and a place where artists could show their work and make money. For most of us it was a kind of parallel universe that we looked on with some skepticism, because the galleries in Cologne in the mid- to late '80s still showed very little interest in what we were doing. But one cannot really go out and party every night, so we weren't tempted to move to Cologne. Of course we would go to openings there.

DB: Did the Dusseldorf artists have their own personal style?

TR: I wore a secondhand jacket, because I didn't have any money, and I carried things around in plastic bags from the supermarket. I looked like some kind of menial worker or clerk rather than an artist. The people we looked up to were American Minimalists, not European bohemian artist types. We didn't want to be dandies, like the famous painters.