Sometimes size does matter. Thomas Ruff was among the first contemporary artists to print photographs on a scale that rivaled painting and to face-mount his prints to Plexiglas—a technique that brings the subject into the viewer’s world seemingly without any barrier or mediation.

Ruff is among a generation of German photographers (along with Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Candida Hofer) who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s. All were students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and from their teachers they adopted a serial, typological approach to their subjects—recording and categorizing their subjects with a no-nonsense objectivity. Here, Ruff rejected the conventions of artistic portraiture (“We weren’t living by candlelight in caves anymore,” he said) and instead portrayed his fellow students and art-world friends as if for an ID card or mug shot. Despite—or perhaps because of—that deadpan, frontal presentation, neutral background, and monumental scale, Ruff’s portraits such as this one of the German artist Carol Pilar are both mesmerizing and impenetrable. “Maybe my portraits are anachronistic,” Ruff has said, “because even though they show every detail of the skin, clothes, and hair of the sitter, they still don’t try to show any of his or her feelings.”