Thomas Ruff: Tripe

This body of work is inspired by negatives of India and Burma (now Myanmar) taken by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an officer in Britain’s East India Company army, in the 1850s. These negatives represent a nineteenth-century solution for travel photography because they were lighter and more transportable than glass negatives, though more susceptible to aging. Using a computer program to invert these negatives into positive images, Ruff then further digitally manipulated them in a manner analogous to hand-retouching, thus highlighting both the subject matter of the images and the analog processes used to create them.