For his Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photographs) series, Thomas Ruff found images in newspapers, and then re-photographed and enlarged them to isolate the photographs from the text, allowing the viewer, now no longer a reader, to make assumptions about the photograph without any information to support the inferences. Ruff collected images from German newspapers and weeklies between 1981 and 1991, building an archive of 2,500 images. In 1990 and 1991 he selected 400 images from it, according to entirely subjective criteria, photographed them without captions and had them reproduced as colour prints in twice their original size. The book consists of these 400 reproductions.