Thomas Ruff: Bonfils

This series takes its point of departure in a collection of glass negatives produced by the French photographic studio Maison Bonfils in the late nineteenth century. Founded in Beirut, Syria, in 1867 by Felix Bonfils, Marie-Lydie Cabanis, and their son Adrien, the studio took thousands of photographs of landscapes and cities within the Middle East, depicting both ancient sites and vernacular scenes. Upon acquiring the glass negatives, Ruff was fascinated equally by their various signs of aging as by a series of overt attempts to alter the original images, such as hand coloring the backgrounds and adding the studio’s signature directly onto the motifs. As with his series Tripe from 2018, which was based on negatives made by British photographer Linnaeus Tripe in the 1850s, Ruff rephotographed the Bonfils negatives and employed his own digital revision of various aspects of the images. The layering of the older photographs with Ruff’s retouching—coupled with marks and scratches added by the passage of time—can be seen as a conceptual comment on the idea of photographs as timestamps—while they are able to record a particular instant, they are invariably always documents of the past.