Go to a European art school or a large group show, and you’ll see them everywhere: large photographs of expressionless faces. Thomas Ruff is not solely responsible for this phenomenon of course; he emerged in the ’80s as part of a group of artists doing related work, including Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Andreas Gursky, all of whom studied under Bernd and Hilda Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. For some reason, though, among these artists, who together have shifted the very vocabulary of contemporary art, Ruff seems to have made the biggest impact.

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