Constellation, from the portfolio In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy

In his Constellation series, conceptual artist Thomas Ruff reprinted photographs of deep space from negatives taken at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The coordinates of this image are within the Southern Hemisphere constellation Carina, which includes the Carina Nebula, a vast region of star formation. Its areas of dark absorption nebulae and light emission nebulae are visible in the upper left-hand quadrant of the photograph. Ruff's appropriation of such scientific documents, however, seems to highlight their beauty as much as their content.