Photography is a language and most important advances in the language/art of photography come from artists not photographers. ( See David Hockney for example)
Thomas Ruff is an exception to that rule. His entire career has been dedicated to challenging what we think a photograph is or could be. His recent photograms were not photograms at all but computer generated works based on the idea of photograms. Both the objects and the light in Ruff’s photograms derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program. He also did an entire series of images based on pixelated jpegs as well as a series of 3D and manipulated NASA Space images.
A survey of over 60 works are here.
A good interview about his photograms is here.
