Thomas Ruff’s work shows the influence of the documentary style he learned while studying under Bernd and Hilla Becher. His corpus can be seen retrospectively as a grand project to plumb the possibilities of the photographic medium in the age of digitalisation. He has explored military nocturnal photography, old archives and negatives of the night sky above Chile taken in 1989–1992 at the European Southern Observatory. In 1999 he began making a series called Nudes, comprised of manipulated pornographic pictures from the Internet. It was published in 2003 with a text by Michel Houellebecq. Ruff selected details, blew them up, changed the colour contrasts and reduced the definition to around 70 pixels to make a blurred effect, akin to the paintings of Gerhard Richter, another important reference for him. By softening the images in this way, explicit pornography was transformed into suggestive eroticism.