How much visual information is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of speedy comprehension. In the Jpegs series, German photographer Thomas Ruff exploits this imprecision in digital technology, locating online jpegs and enlarging them until the pixels emerge in a chessboard pattern of near abstraction. A closer look at these images reveals that, in addition to the degeneration of the image into a digital grid, the color and brightness generated by the algorithms of the compression also become visible. Many of Ruff's works in this series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, or conversely, on scenes of war and nature disturbed by human manipulation--subjects ill suited to disruptive pixelation, and therefore perfect for Ruff's purposes. Taken together, these images constitute an encyclopedic compendium of contemporary visual culture that also engages the history of landscape painting. A fittingly deluxe and oversize volume, Jpegs is the first monograph dedicated exclusively to this monumental series.
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"Photography today lives, quick and dirty, compressed and lossy, on Flickr and Google Earth and the Web in general. Copy a jpeg and enlarge it - make the medium the message, as Ruff does here primarily with images of landscapes and disasters - and it fractures into the twenty-first-century Impressionism of pixilation, a quality that feels both sensual and cold and equalises everything from an al-Qaeda training camp to a neo-Romantic waterfall scene... 'Jpegs' can be considered nothing less than a summa of how we picture the world today: in a manner both panoptical and flattened, losing resolution to gain information." --Art Review
--This text refers to an alternate
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By W. Rosen
Format:Hardcover
This is a very large and oversized book which helps add to the painterly qualities of these images. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed looking at these since I wasn't expecting much. The colors are vivid and these make you question whether you are looking at a photo or something else.
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