"Around 1998, Thomas Ruff began to work on nude photography and, at the same time, began experimenting with computer-generated, abstract pictures made of pixels. Through Internet research into the genre of nude photography, he came across the field of pornography and the disposable images of “thumbnail galleries” in the World Wide Web. Due to the poor resolution (72 dpi), they had a rough pixel structure, which resembled the one he had been experimenting with for abstract pixel images. He decided to process them in such a way that the pixel structure was only just barely visible when enlarging the images but changed them by using fuzziness and other blurring techniques, modifying the coloring and removing intrusive details. By doing so, he lent the “obscene” images a painterly appearance and focused on the structure and composition of the image. The selection of source images was based on such considerations as image format, lighting, coloring, or presentation, as well as the desire to cover the wide range of present-day sexual fantasies and practices."
