Thomas Ruff was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany. He attended the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1977 to 1985, where he studied under Bernd Becher. Fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, and Thomas Struth. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while he was still a student he transitioned to interiors (1979-1983) and deadpan portraits of friends.

During the first Gulf War, Ruff used a night-vision enhancer to render ominous images of the streets of Dusseldorf at night in his Nacht series (1992-1996). In 1999, the artist made a series of digitally altered photographs of Modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe.

His series of nudes (1999-2000) are also digitally manipulated images, but here he began with photographs from pornographic websites; his Substrat series (2002-2003), based on images from Japanese manga cartoons, continued this exploration of digitally altered web-based pictures.