‘My images are not images of reality, but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.’

Thomas Ruff

In his Sterne series (1989 -1992), Thomas Ruff takes the objectivity of documentation in photography into a dialogue between reality and art. Using high-resolution negatives obtained from the archives of the European Southern Observatory, Ruff cropped, printed and repositioned the negatives of the night sky above Chile. In the present work, we experience the transformation from scientific document to art, whereby a seemingly objective image is viewed as abstracted beauty. The work confronts us with our tendency to impose what we think we see. When we look at a star in the night sky, we are not seeing the actual star itself, but a trace of light travelling across time and space. And that too is what defines a photograph – light traces on paper of something that no longer exists.