Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in the small town of Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest of Germany, the fourth of six children and the son of a ceramist. In the early 70s he became interested in astronomy and then photography, acquiring first a small telescope and later his first camera. Introduced to minimal and conceptual art while a student at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, he was shocked to realize that the photographs he had been taking were only imitative and clichE. Soon after he was accepted into Bernd Becher's class, along with fellow students Candida H fer, Axel H tte and Thomas Struth. The Interiors series was begun in this academic context, the Portraits series a few years later. Ruff's first solo show took place at a Munich gallery in 1981. Within less than a decade, he was being included in international exhibitions such as the Aperto in Venice. One decade after that he was appointed professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and was the subject of a large-scale retrospective that toured Germany, Ireland, Norway, Italy, England and Portugal.