Thomas Ruff is a German photographer associated with the Dusseldorf School of Photography. Over the course of his three- decade career, it is his medium that has served as his subject matter. Constantly circling a curiosity about visual systems, Ruff's work is rooted in a belief that photography need not portray the truth of an image; rather, it is the image itself that needs to be authentic.

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Ruff studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy Art Academy from 1977 to 1985 under influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like his Dusseldorf School contemporaries Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer, Ruff inherited the exacting objectivity of his tutors but focused it primarily on the method of producing artwork, rather than the artwork's intended meaning. Thomas Ruff's practice intentionally explores the fundamentals of photography, both in terms of its classical genre conventions— the nude, the portrait, and the landscape—and its technical constraints. Half of his artworks are now created from behind a computer screen as opposed to a viewfinder, shifting the notion of authorship by drawing from archival and internet source material to demonstrate how photographs are created and manipulated.

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In 2016, Ruff won the Artist of the Year award at American Friends of Museums (AFIM), New York. He won the PhotoEspaña 2011 Award and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2006. In 2003, Ruff won the Hans-Thoma Preis from the Hans-Thoma Museum.