Thomas Ruff, Whitechapel Gallery

Thomas Ruff is a photographer’s photographer. He positions photography as his subject as well as his medium, and experiments ceaselessly with exposure, scale, colour, and abstraction. Often, his work seems to ask stubborn questions: what is a photograph?

Now, the Whitechapel Gallery brings an expansive retrospective of Ruff’s incredibly diverse work to London. Undulating neon abstractions that look almost computer-generated rub shoulders with the pristine pastel headshots of his famous Portraits series. Elsewhere in the exhibition, ornate portraits of Mughal nobles retrieved from archives are blown up to immense proportions – and left in ghostly negative.

These pieces, which are in many ways stylistically and conceptually distinct, have in common Ruff’s preoccupation with the boundaries of photography. The Passport series takes a functional format – the passport photo – and puts it in place of the portrait. Ruff’s Mughal portraits, hazy, haunting and also disconcerting, posit the negative as a medium as valid as the developed photograph.

Thomas Ruff at the Whitechapel Gallery promises to be a photography exhibition to rival Tillmans’s retrospective at the Tate Modern earlier this year.

Culture Whisper readers can buy two tickets to the Thomas Ruff exhibition for the price of one by using code WHISPER241. Simply book via Whitechapel's website and follow these instructions:

1. Click here to book now
2. Chose either Full Price or Concession
3. Chose Quantity 2
4. Add to Basket
5. Enter Voucher Code WHISPER241, Apply
6. Check Out