Made in Düsseldorf from 1981 to 1991 and again from 1998 to 2001, Portraits (German: Porträts) by Thomas Ruff depicts young adults from the photographer's social and artistic circles.
Ruff conceived the series while studying with Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, beginning with members of the punk band EKG before recruiting fellow students, friends, and acquaintances from the city's nightlife. He sought a minimalist alternative to conventional portraiture, arguing that a photograph records a person's surface rather than revealing personality. Ruff later called the group "a kind of official portrait of my generation." By removing professions, addresses, and other social identifiers, the pictures retain hairstyles, clothing, and facial presentation as signs of their time without organizing the sitters into a social taxonomy.
The subjects wear ordinary clothes and face the camera with calm, serious expressions. Early bust-length portraits use colored card backgrounds selected by the sitters and alternate among frontal, profile, and three-quarter views. After Ruff enlarged five photographs in 1986, the backgrounds became pale or white because saturated colors dominated at monumental scale, while frontal poses grew more common. Soft, even, shadowless light describes skin, hair, and clothing in detail. Repeated framing and restrained expressions establish a serial rhythm, with small variations becoming conspicuous across rows of faces.
Ruff worked with a tripod-mounted 4 × 5-inch plate camera, sheet film, a 300 mm lens, and flash. The long lens produced a narrow zone of focus extending approximately from nose to ears, while short exposures preserved facial detail. The chromogenic color prints were made in two sizes: small works measuring 24 × 18 cm and large works generally measuring 210 × 165 cm. Production paused in 1991 when Ruff's preferred photographic paper was discontinued and resumed in 1998 through tests of new film, processing, and paper combinations.
The first dedicated exhibitions took place in 1988 at Museum Schloß Hardenberg, Mai 36 Galerie, and Portikus, accompanied by the project-specific book Thomas Ruff – Porträts. The series subsequently appeared in the touring exhibition Portraits, Houses, Stars from 1989 to 1990, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 1991, Museum Folkwang in 2002, Haus der Kunst in 2012, and the National Portrait Gallery in 2017–2018. Ruff later reused its images in blaue Augen and Other Portraits, while works from Portraits entered collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Institut d'art contemporain, and the Walther Collection.
