Thomas Ruffs work provides the essential meeting ground between artist and viewer as equal creators of perception. The artist's series of mid-sized Andere Portrats, straight-on headshots of women and men that have been "mixed", are presented with a series of stereoscopic images from Ruffs early years in Germany's Black Forest.
The Andere Portrats (other portraits), resembling at first passport photos or mugshots, are pirated from his own internationally renowned Portrait series. Ruff has rephotographed this work, rendering a (new) doppleganger in a state of metamorphosis. Stripped of the attributes usually captured or given by the artist/photographer: pose, expression, and the markings of status; these subjects, in the artist's own words, are "thingified". They stay transfixed, to be inspected, stared at, but never truly identified. In their state of completion, the works are silkscreen prints, not photographs, created through the grid of objectivity. They repossess the structure of portraiture, throwing the weight of identity off the subject and artist and onto the viewer.
The stereo images are shown with a device of Ruff's own making to provide a 3-D image in the mind of the viewer. Together with the portraits, Ruff's work affirms that most of reality actually takes place in the imagination.