German artist Thomas Ruff’s major new work bridges the gap between digital manipulation and one of the earliest important achievements of analog photography. It completely reimagines a series of photos from the 1850s of temples, palaces, and monuments in India and Burma (now Myanmar), originally taken by British army commander and photographer Linnaeus Tripe. Tripe, an Englishman, joined the East India Company in 1838 and moved to southern India in 1840. However, Tripe only became interested in photography after he moved to Bangalore in 1854, following a four-year leave in England that was extended due to his poor health. Remarkably, he spent only two years taking pictures in Southeast Asia, but ten years printing them.

Born in 1958 in the Black Forest, Germany, Thomas Ruff first discovered photographic art while studying in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Alongside other Becher master students such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff has also photographed his way up the ranks of the world’s most renowned photo artists. He is a modest man and tends to reject compulsively exaggerated interpretations of his subjects. The art world has honored his search for new forms of expression in photography since the early 1980s with exhibitions in galleries, at documenta, the Biennale, and in many museums such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Tate Liverpool, and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum.