In terms of photography, the touchstone for understanding Ruiter's work is found in the nineteenth century. It is found specifically in the work of one of photography's inventors, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, particularly Daguerre's earliest surviving metal-plate, an 1837 still life of plaster casts. In this image, Daguerre photographs a corner of his studio that contains an array of still life objects: antique visual fragments. His arrangement includes a plaster relief of a nude Roman maiden and faun, two medieval cherubic busts, a sculpted rams' head, a basket-covered decanter, and a framed etching. These are all icons drawn from that stable of objects that Western civilization has certified as picturesque, objects that signify both "art" and "history." It seems clear that Daguerre's photographic construction -- perhaps the world's first attempt at fabricating a table-top construction for the purpose of being photographed -- was an attempt not only to ally this new invention with the "artistic" but to give it legitimacy not by indicating its potential for the contemporaneous, but rather by indicating its ability to seize within the current moment the aura of the past. This was not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes was to baptize the Daguerreotype, a "mirror with a memory," but rather a "memory in a mirror." Daguerre references history and the status of the artistic by setting forth a series of fragmentary allusions to past images. Ruiter's basic pictorial and ideational strategies parallel Daguerre's. His work brings together fragments of past and present. The photographic components of Ruiter's work speak insistently of the contemporary, the immediate, and the real, but his assemblage of classical fragments -- reproductions of earlier media -- painting, sculpture, fabric, and statuary -- speak resolutely of the past. But where Daguerre is interested in pointing to the legitimacy of the past and forging the strongest possible link between his newly discovered process and ancient forms and process, Ruiter is more interested in borrowing classic images to offer ironic commentary on the present.