Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny at David Zwirner’s 533 West 19th Street gallery presents twelve large-scale photographs drawn from the artist’s jpegs series. On view from September 10 through October 17, 2026, the exhibition marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and frames Ruff’s work as both a commemoration and a meditation on the unstable life of images.
Ruff was in New York on September 11, 2001, and photographed the attacks and their aftermath. When he returned to Germany several days later, he discovered that none of the photographs had been saved. The absence stayed with him. In 2004, he began collecting images of the event from the internet, searching for a way to respond to a tragedy already surrounded by an overwhelming volume of photographs.
Using digital techniques, Ruff altered the structure of these images. He increased their compression, reduced their resolution and introduced color, then enlarged the results to monumental scale. Smoke, towers, fire and debris remain visible, but their details dissolve into blocks, grids and blurred patches. At close range, the photographs reveal their mechanical construction; from farther away, they regain the force of historical images, hovering between documentary evidence and abstraction.
The work raises difficult questions about how traumatic events become part of collective memory. The photographs Ruff appropriated were already widely reproduced and instantly recognizable. By degrading and transforming them, he does not make the event less real. Instead, he draws attention to the way technology, repetition and circulation shape what societies remember—and to how quickly an image can become both evidence and symbol.
Ruff’s broader practice examines photography as a system rather than a transparent record. In jpegs ny, that investigation carries particular weight because the source material refers to an event whose images remain embedded in public consciousness. The exhibition presents a restrained but unsettling encounter with September 11, one that replaces visual immediacy with distance, fragmentation and sustained attention.
Image: Thomas Ruff, jpeg ny02, 2004. © Thomas Ruff/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Germany. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Instagram 
Facebook 
Pinterest 
X / Twitter 