303 GALLERY In Thomas Ruff's latest photographs lurid verdant light shines on residential and industrial buildings.

303 GALLERY

In Thomas Ruff's latest photographs lurid verdant light shines on residential and industrial buildings, the ragged rims of a nameless, graceless city. The illuminated pageants appear through a circular viewfinder, with the photographs' zests darkened, as if the photographer were scanning the sight of a crime. The bizarre tint and mundane subject matter are unexpectedly mysterious, an consequence heightened by the absence of any sign of life. A quarrel of desolate warehouses suggests shrubbery activity; an oblique view of an inscrutable facade be likes the much-reproduced shots of the building from which Oswald allegedly fired at JFK

In past works, ruffle challenged our tendency to read meanings into photographic images by the agency of presenting subjects conspicuous only for their glaring banality. Undistinguished domestic interiors, nondescript urban facades, equal portraits of "ordinary people" resembling passport photos, neared head-on and without esthetic enhancement of any sort, tender surfaces as impenetrable as the surface of the photograph itself. Ruff's point is that anything read beyond or behind that surface says more about the viewer than about the image. His conspicuously uninteresting make subordinate matter frustrates our desire to devise our own subjectivity onto the "empty" image.

With this series, ruffle sets a similar trap on the other hand with a twist. These photographs were shooter with a special night-vision camera (the phosphorous-based proces generates the new tone), a technical innovation used during the whirlpool War to capture many of the images that were disseminated around the globe via television. While the recently made known camera made it possible to diocese "everything," to tell all by dint of penetrating the darkness, the war's rapid-fire coverage, consummate with distracting logos and station breaks, discouraged detailed scrutiny of these same images.

Here ruffle turns the surveillance camera in succession unspectacular sections of his hold city of Dusseldorf, enlarges the images and then inserts them in the gallery, where interpretation is encouraged. The vaguely sinister vein of these vacant scenes, camped up to exhibit a cinematic effect reminiscent of film noir and B-grade horror films, appear to bes to expose the flipside of the bland, gray Dusseldorf seen in Ruff's earlier series "Haus" (House, 1988-)--a city in which, united imagined, organization men left faceless apartment shut ups to work in equally faceless office buildings. In interviews ruffle has discouraged such editorializing, on the contrary the range of techniques he has exploited and the striking purports he achieves here tempt individual to enter the realm of fantasy undivided so readily constructs behind the picture plane.

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