Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rachel Wells
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
The chapter examines the use of pixelation in Thomas Ruff’s jpeg series. Ruff has recently explored the revelation of the pixel grid through the enlargement of digital images; I argue that this work addresses not only what Ruff describes as a “grammar of the media”, but also a tension between finitude and that which is beyond measure. Drawing upon writing on digitisation by William J Mitchell and Lev Manovich, who have highlighted the fixed resolution of a digital image according to its number of indivisible pixels, I suggest that Ruff’s revelation of the pixel grid through enlargement suggests a refusal to disguise the precise limitation of the information contained in an image. The fact that enlargement beyond a certain limit in this format can ‘reveal nothing new’ is treated as its own revelation: the closer the viewer gets to the work, the less intelligble the image becomes; one has to acknowledge one’s own distance in order to see the subject represented most clearly. While pixelation is regularly used as a televisual technique to protect identity or to hide brand names, in Ruff’s gigantic art objects the effect of pixelation is one of denied understanding, of something obscured. The chapter goes on to examine the use of Ruff’s jpeg photographs of 9/11, arguing that visual aspects of digitisation can suggest, as Susan Sontag did in Regarding the Pain of Others, that only by becoming resolved to their own distance and limitation can attempts to comprehend the horror of 9/11 by those who were not directly affected come closest and see most clearly. One particular image, jpeg ny02, has been appropriated as a means of commemoration, and, as I suggest, as a means of possible resistance within the context of an American ‘image defeat’ at the hands of terrorism. I argue that Ruff’s jpeg images of war prompt an examination of the relationship between recognition and intelligibility, a relationship which Judith Butler has recently claimed to be crucial to photography’s affective and interpretative promptings. If, as Butler claims, intelligibility is a precondition of recognition, then Ruff here enlarges the dangers of recognition without full intelligibility. His Jpeg series suggests the need to break apart, fragment, a recognised, learned response from the media’s ‘model of images’ in order to try to understand a larger ‘horror and outrage’.
Author(s): Wells R
Editor(s): Alexandra Moschovi, Carol McKay, Arabella Plouviez
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet
Year: 2013
Pages: 205-221
Print publication date: 01/10/2013
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Place Published: Leuven
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9789058679758
