Chromogenic print on photographic paper
Paper size: 70 x 50 cm
Edition of 50

The series _Tate Modern: Ten Artists, Ten Images_ was commissioned to celebrate the opening of Tate Modern in May 2000. Ten prominent contemporary artists working with photography were invited to create an artwork inspired by and in response to the Bankside building, its development and its surroundings. The resulting pictures chart different aspects of the site's development from power station to museum of modern art. Ruff's has photographed a number of Herzog and de Meuron projects, the architects responsible for the construction of Tate Modern..

The artist Thomas Ruff is a German photographer. He has worked with a broad range of subject matter throughout his life. In his early career he documented domestic interiors, he went on to create a series of portraits with which he became synonymous. These photographs are monumental, highly detailed and immaculately finished, and show the subjects as ordinary people, devoid of expression. The suggestion within these works is that it is impossible to photographically represent a subject's inner life and positing instead a more democratic, socially based mode of representation. Ruff's next significant body of work was _Haus_, 1987, a series of images depicting post-war era reconstruction of grey apartment blocks. The intention of this work was to restrict himself and through selection, manipulation and presentation found expression in the series_ Zeitungsphoto_: images cut from newspapers, enlarged and presented without captions or explanations. Ruff 's work took on a more explicit political theme with a series of photographs inspired by night-vision cameras relaying television images during the Gulf War.

He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1977-85) under Bernd Becher.