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Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruff's Jpeg series

This chapter on Thomas Ruff's 'Jpeg' series of photographs offers an original reading of his work, and a broader argument about the relationship between digital images, the media, and war. It contextualises Ruff's series within his wider practice in order to consider the implications of the recent acquisition of 'Jpeg ny 02' by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a commemorative artwork for victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The chapter therefore considers the relationship between the digital image and memory, the nature of using artwork to commemorate and in some way resist what has been described as a 'war of images', and the impact of digital photography in the reporting of conflict. It draws upon important recent writing by Judith Butler, Retort, Susan Sontag and Hito Steyerl. The chapter forms part of a book on the relationship between photography and the Internet, an urgent area of critical debate within both artistic practice and a global cultural context. The book, edited by Alexandra Moschovi, is the result of the 2011 international conference 'The Versatile Image: Photography in the Era of Web 2.0'. Other contributors include David Bate, Martin Lister and Mia Fineman. The book explores the ontological, conceptual, technical and aesthetic premises of photography in the era of Web 2.0: the changing use, exhibition and social value of vernacular imagery, the mutation of photographic genres, the blurring of boundaries between private and public, and issues of voyeurism, exhibitionism and ethics. This essay falls under the heading, ‘Appropriated Images and Creative Repurposing in Contemporary Art Practice’. (While there is a discussion of one of Ruff’s images in my book ‘Scale in Contemporary Sculpture’, the majority of this essay presents new material and research: the overall argument and many of the methodological references do not feature in the book.)