Thomas Ruff : tableaux chinois / conception, Thomas Ruff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ruff, Thomas, 1958- photographer.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

German

Subjects (All):

Ruff, Thomas, 1958-.

Ruff, Thomas.

Photography, Artistic.

Physical Description:

xvii pages, 85 leaves of plates : color illustrations, portraits ; 38 cm + 1 supplement (xi pages ; 36 cm)

Other Title:

Tableaux chinois

Place of Publication:

Cologne : Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, [2022]

Language Note:

Texts in English and German.

Summary:

An ingenious photographic analysis of Chinese propaganda across two photo technologies. In the early 2000s, Thomas Ruff chanced across a coffee-table propaganda book on Mao Zedong and became interested in the visual rhetoric of Chinese Communism, eventually purchasing copies of "La Chine" -- the French iteration of a periodical that the Chinese Communist Party produced from the late 1950s through the 1970s as a means of demonstrating the advantages of Communism to European countries. Ruff scanned images from "La Chine" depicting cheerful soldiers, scenic views, ceremonial occasions and Mao himself, enlarging them to reveal the offset halftone dots, then duplicating the image and converting it into pixels; that image was then layered over the original scan, from which Ruff removed various areas. The final image therefore contains both analog halftone and digital pixel. As Susanne Holschbach observes, "Ruff has visually merged the technological process of preparing photographs for their mass distribution from the two photographic eras on one pictorial plane." -- publisher's statement.

Notes:

Supplement contains the German translation of the texts.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

ISBN:

9783753301761

3753301760

OCLC:

1336481117

Publisher Number:

9783753301761