[1] Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German photographers Laurenz Berges, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte.

[8] The resulting Portraits depict the individual persons – often Ruff's fellow students[9] – framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background.

[11] By 1987 Ruff had distilled the project in several ways, settling on an almost exclusive use of the full frontal view and enlarging the finished work to monumental proportions.

[12] Art critic Charles Hagen, writing for The New York Times, commented: "Blown up to wall-size proportions, the photographs looked like gigantic banners of Eastern European dictators.

Ruff's building portraits are likewise serial, and have been edited digitally to remove obstructing details – a typifying method, which gives the images an exemplary character.

Having worked with architectural subject matter since the mid-1980s, Ruff was enlisted to photograph the Krefeld buildings as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno.

series, also sourced from the NASA website, Ruff has transformed the raw black and white fragmentary representations of the planet Mars with interjections of saturated color.

[31] The photograms series depict abstract shapes, lines, and spirals in seemingly random formations with varying degrees of transparency and illumination.

[28] Exhibited for the first time at Sprüth Magers's Berlin gallery in 2017, the press++ series is based on images that have been published in American newspapers and magazines from the 1920s to 1970s and that Ruff found on eBay.

[32] To produce these works, Ruff scans the front and back of each photograph and combines them digitally, considering the original image and crops, touch-ups, date stamps, scribbles, and smudges.

[33] After a number of collaborations with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the firm designed a studio building for Ruff and Gursky in Düsseldorf.

First exhibited at David Zwirner's 533 West 19th Street location in New York, the d.o.pe series takes its title from Aldous Huxley's autobiographical work The Doors of Perception, which explores the author's experience using mescaline.

For this series, Ruff prints fractal patterns created with a specialized software program onto industrial carpets, extending the artist's interest in the limits of human perception and the creation of digital imagery that is at once natural and artificial.