Nights (Nächte), 1993

Part of Thomas Ruff’s Nächte (Nights) series, this edition of five prints is based on photographs created using a night vision device originally developed for military use. Triggered by televised night footage of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, Ruff became intrigued by the eerie green glow of light intensifier technology and its capacity to render the invisible visible. Equipping his own camera with such a device, he began photographing backyards, buildings, and street scenes in and around Düsseldorf, later extending his nocturnal explorations to other urban environments. The resulting images – drenched in ghostly monochrome green – evoke a sense of surveillance, unease, and cinematic mystery. With Nächte (Nights), Ruff shifts his attention from the documentary to the technological, examining how tools of vision affect what, and how, we see.