“Photography quickly came to be used in a prejudicial way,” explains the German photographer Thomas Ruff, “losing its innocence and consequently its ability to communicate.” Focusing on the grammar of photography, Ruff moves between a broad range of photographic types to show how a medium that supposedly captures the truth can actually distort it. In the exhibition “Tableaux Chinois,” Ruff look at Mao’s China. He sources archival imagery—pages of party literature, excerpts from the French magazine La Chine—and then manipulates the images so that analog and digital converge, revealing the embedded ideological inflections. In Ruff’s hands, the nuances of propaganda are both shocking and revelatory. —E.C.