2018
In the airy splendour of his studio in Düsseldorf, custom-designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, Thomas Ruff opens a drawer and pulls out a small photographic print. It is an image from the 1920s of a woman, Ruth Snyder, in the process of her execution by electric chair. The composition is strange: too much foreground and awkwardly angled.
Ruff, one of the world’s most feted photographers, explains: the chilling picture was taken covertly, by a journalist who had strapped a camera to his right ankle. Then Ruff shows me the print that was used in the New York Daily News, expertly cropped and straightened.
It is less dramatic, I say to him. He agrees. The drawer is full of photographic negatives, the first and original versions of a whole assortment of historical incidents, in their raw, unvarnished forms. “Nothing can compete with negatives,” he says quietly.
That purist streak lies behind Ruff’s latest series of photographic works, freshly commissioned by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to celebrate the opening of its new photography centre. Tripe/Ruff is a collaborative series, of sorts. The German photographer has taken his inspiration from a set of architectural and topographical images of monuments in India and Burma taken by British photographer Linnaeus Tripe in the 1850s.
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