That old rivalry between photography and painting comes into focus in Thomas Ruff’s new work at David Zwirner Gallery. These photographs want to compete. They have the subject, size, and technique of paintings. And the ambition. The dialogue between photography and painting is integral to the meaning of Mr. Ruff’s work, but something more is at stake here.

In his latest work, done over the last two years, Mr. Ruff has borrowed images ranging from pastoral landscapes to atomic bomb explosions, from the Internet. Many of them are violent – September 11, burning oil springs in Iraq – but there are also idealized landscapes, a traditional subject of 19th-century painting. That Mr. Ruff appropriates images is old news. He’s been experimenting with computer manipulation and idealized representation since the 1990s, incorporating archival photos of astronomy, architecture, press photos, Internet pornography, and other Web-based images into his wall-sized works.

Mr. Ruff dislikes being described as “impressionistic,” yet even he has used the word to describe his own work. We simply have no other word for it. The visual effects are from digital images enlarged beyond their capacity to retain the information accurately. His palette of greens and whites softened by the out of focus effects, though, suggests 19thcentury painting. From a distance, “jpeg bo02 2004” could be a companion to Turner’s “Peace – Burial at Sea”; up close the burning oil field and the medium-pixels distance it from Turner’s work.

This work is a lexicon of contemporary history. The strange numerical names contrast with the recognizable events depicted in the photographs. The contrast has a certain shock value as does the digital manipulation. Mount St. Helens erupting is a shockingly violent scene from a distance. Upclose, it is a beautiful new landscape of color, pixels, grids, and grids within grids. Mr. Ruff has transmuted the low-grade digital information into painterly, scumbled effect with his computer manipulations.

The artist made his debut in 1991 with “House N.R.71.”A decade later he was enjoying a six-nation mid-career show, setting auction house records, and being short-listed for the Citibank photography prize. When 44 Ruff photographs came up for auction in 2002, bidding reaching six figures for some of the individual prints. His “Constellation” series (1989-1992) is one of the most sought after bodies of work in the contemporary art market. His 16-page resume suggests it has been a long road.

At the start of his career, Mr. Ruff was in search of beautiful pictures. At the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1977 to 1985, he studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher. In exploring the discipline, he abandoned his quest for beauty. But, he’s now come full circle. The evolution of his work, along with that of his Academy colleagues Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, is one of the major stories of contemporary photography. The group and the dialogue made such a splash that the term “Struffsky” was coined.

At the opening of the Zwirner show, Mr. Ruff said “There are no innocent landscapes.” Has our visual culture become such a melding of information and technology that it can only result in corrupted imagery, distorting reality in immutable ways? The impulse to alter photographs is as old as the medium itself but the means by which the alteration occurs is increasingly sophisticated, leaving the viewer to wonder if there is any accuracy or truth in the final image. Does it matter?

Mr. Ruff’s work speaks to the merging of science and art, issues of formal beauty and the degradation of imagery through electronic techniques as a metaphor for our culture. But in the end, what we’re looking at is undeniably beautiful.

Until April 2 at David Zwirner Gallery (525 W. 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-727-2072). Prices: $85,00-$120,000.