The Tripe Portfolio is a portfolio of six photographs by Dusseldorf-based artist Thomas Ruff. The new major work by German artist Thomas Ruff builds a bridge between digital image processing and one of the earliest important achievements of analog photography. It completely recreates a series of images from the 1850s of temples, palaces and monuments in India and Burma (now Myanmar), originally taken by British army commander and photographer Linnaeus Tripe. The Englishman Linnaeus Tripe joined the East India Company in 1838 and moved to the south of India in 1840. However, Tripe only became interested in photography after he moved to Bangalore in 1854, following a four-year leave in England, which was extended due to his poor health. Remarkably, he only spent two years taking pictures in Southeast Asia, but ten printing them. Thomas Ruff reimagines the India and Burma of the 1850s. The Thomas Ruff / Linnaeus Tripe series, commissioned to coincide with the opening of the V&A Museum’s brand new Photography Centre in London on October 12, 2018, features a series of images from the 1850s of temples, palaces and monuments in India and Burma (now Myanmar) taken by British army captain and photographer Linnaeus Tripe. The Englishman joined the East India Company in 1838 and moved to the south of India in 1840. However, Tripe only became interested in photography after moving to Bangalore in 1854 following a four-year leave in England, which he extended due to poor health. Remarkably, he spent only two years taking pictures in Southeast Asia, but ten years printing them. ‘There’s a golden moment when [Tripe] made an incredible survey of all these places in India and Burma, some of which had never been photographed before,’ says Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at the V&A. It’s a balancing act between a topographical survey and an admission that he was passionate about the art of photography. Thomas Ruff undertook his own expeditions into the V&A’s viewing space, eventually selecting 20 images from the 400-image collection of Tripe paper negatives in the archive (ten works from the new series are on display in the opening exhibition). The negatives were photographed on a light box in the London museum and sent to him digitally (the titles of the artworks read like file names). Ruff began by overlaying Tripe’s sepia-toned negative with the positive of the albumen print on the screen, selectively working out blue areas before enlarging the image to more than three times its original size, enhancing the texture of the paper and the minute details hidden within. Ruff’s adaptation of Tripes’ images is quietly sublime as he pays tribute to their scale, beauty and painterly quality. I didn’t want to compete with his print. I really wanted to show the negative – or the state of the negative – 160 years later,” says Ruff when we visit his Düsseldorf studio in the run-up to the opening. Everything that was on the negatives has remained and is visible. Every scratch, every speck of dust, every water stain, every discoloration and every crease can be seen in the 80 x 140 cm prints, which Ruff – in contrast to Tripe – absolutely wanted to exhibit uncut. This is the first time Thomas Ruff has worked with paper negatives, and he was fascinated by Tripe’s early “retouching” process, particularly his hand-painting on the back of the negatives to add clouds or emphasize the ripples on the water. (Early photographic emulsions were hypersensitive to blue and did not register clouds, so 19th century photographers often retouched the sky to make the image more interesting.) The photographs were the subject of an exhibition at the V&A in 2015, but in this ‘charged’ context the works take on a new life. ‘Now is the right time to look at the aesthetics of the images and really rethink them as objects,’ says Barnes. Thomas has mastered the world of analog and digital, so his language of understanding the chemistry, optics and ambition in making these images allows him to digitally pull [unique] things out of the images. By transferring them to the digital world, we were able to see what was never seen on these negatives.

The commission by Thomas Ruff / Tripe stands in poetic symmetry to the 150 or so cameras at the entrance to the newly designed galleries – the installation also spans 160 years. When most people think of photography, they only think of the time since the invention of 35mm film by Leica [in 1913]. Then things moved on and film was replaced by a digital sensor. That’s what photography is to them – that kind of simple photography,” muses Ruff. The artist continues: “I would say that’s only 5 percent of the photographic world. If you go back, you’ll find that every photographer who took pictures in the first 50 years had to find their own technique. Everyone was a scientist or an engineer. It was a really rich and wide world of photography. The new photography center provides the perfect stage for Ruff’s latest series – a most enjoyable portal into the long history of the medium. Born in the Black Forest in 1958, Thomas Ruff first discovered the art of photography while studying in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Fortunately for all collectors. Alongside other Becher master students such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff has also made his way into the ranks of the world’s most renowned photo artists. He is modest and rather dismissive of compulsively exaggerated interpretations of his subjects. The art world has honored his search for new forms of photographic expression since the early 1980s with exhibitions in galleries, at the documenta, the Biennale and in many museums such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Tate Liverpool and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.