Candida H\u00f6fer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth are three very prominent contemporary art photographers. \u00a0All three were students of Berndt and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, all work in series. \u00a0They often–not always–work with large cameras and large prints. There is enough common ground, in fact, for a fairly casual \u00a0viewer to underestimate the marked differences among them.<\/p>\n
I’m currently reviewing three DVDs by Ralph Goertz, one on each of these artists.\u00a0Goertz has apparently adapted the conceptual structure of the photographic series to film: by keeping many features the same from one film to the next, he emphasizes the differences between the featured artists. \u00a0In all the films, in particular, the “script” consists almost entirely of the artist speaking, in most cases extemporaneously, or apparently so; each film has a number of fixed features, e.g. a close-up shot of the artist making minute adjustments to the camera settings, a recognizably “high art” environment–white gloves, white exhibition spaces, teams of curatorial, archival and installation staff. \u00a0In all of them, we hear the same kind of made-to-order rock when we’re looking at the work itself. \u00a0Each film starts at a point close to the present, and uses earlier work shown with voiceover to loop back through the artist’s past, concluding with very recent events. \u00a0It makes for three very clear, if fairly uneventful films. \u00a0As a series, however, the work really comes into its own, putting if \u00a0a viewer in a position to see quite unexpected and crucial differences among these three photographers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Candida H\u00f6fer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth are three very prominent contemporary art photographers. \u00a0All three were students of Berndt and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, all work in series. \u00a0They often–not always–work...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[191,113,109,190,192],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-photography","tag-candida-hofer","tag-photography","tag-source-magazine","tag-thomas-ruff","tag-thomas-struth"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}