I really do not going around during jubilee season looking for roadtripping pictures of the Queen to post; they come to me.
As someone who has been collecting old press photos for many, many years, I was very disappointed to see Thomas Ruff’s show of press photos at Zwirner in 2016. His approach to these prints, much-handled survivors of a quick and dirty daily newspaper publishing process, was to overlay the back annotations on the marked up front, and to print them in a giant, slick, digital format. [You can take the photographer out of Dusseldorf…]
The print that accompanies a recent artists book, Untitled (worktitle), about which I can find almost no information, is different. It’s small, perhaps even original size, and it’s printed on both sides. It’s almost–can I say it?–a facsimile.
But what first caught my eye was the slightly blurry image itself, which gave me the momentary sense of envy-tinged-excitement that Ruff had snagged a press photo of an early, obscure Gerhard Richter.
Only to find out the whole book is press photos of the Queen. Oh well. Carry on, I guess.
Thomas Ruff editions [mo-artgallery.com]