He shares a studio on Hansaallee, with Laurenz Berges, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte. A former municipal electricity station, it was converted between 1998 and 2000 by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame, and updated with a basement gallery in 2011. In 2003, Thomas Ruff published a photographic collection of "Nudes" with a text by French author Michel Houellebecq. His images were based on Internet porn, which was digitally processed and obscured without any camera or traditional photographic device. In 2009, the Aperture Foundation in New York published "jpegs", a large-scale book dedicated exclusively to his monumental series of pixilated enlargements of internet-culled images, all compressed using the standard JPEG format. On February 7, 2011, one of his "Nudes" pictures appeared on the cover of New York Magazine. And Texan designer Tom Ford owns the image below.