Michael Ruetz (4 April 1940 – 2 December 2024) was a German photographer, artist, and author.

Background

Ruetz was born in Berlin, Germany on 4 April 1940. His ancestors were from Riga, where they worked as printers, journalists and publishers. After attending school in Bremen, Ruetz studied Sinology, with Japanology and Journalism as subsidiary subjects, in Freiburg, Munich and Berlin. Until 1969 he worked on a dissertation on the novel A Flower in a Sinful Sea by Zeng Pu (1905). In 1975, Ruetz graduated as external student from the Folkwang Hochschule Essen. Ruetz died on 2 December 2024, at the age of 84, in the German Heart Center Berlin.

Career

Ruetz was a member of the Stern editorial in Hamburg from 1969 to 1973. Later he was self-employed and worked as a freelance author and photographer. From 1981, Ruetz was a contract author for publishers Little, Brown & Co./New York Graphic Society, Boston, Massachusetts. In 1982, he became professor of Communication Design at the Braunschweig University of Art and taught Photography until 2005. Ruetz lived in Italy, Australia and the U.S. for 12 years. Ruetz was the sole heir of German photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke's artistic work and managed his estate from 1983 until 2020. He organised major retrospectives of Heinz Hajek-Halke in Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2002, at Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in 2007, at Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich in 2008 and at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, in 2012. Ruetz was a member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh), the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL)/Deutsche Foto Akademie and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. In May 2002 he was appointed member of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres by French Minister of the Arts, Jean-Jacques Aillagon.

Works

Ruetz first became known through his photographs of the student protest movement in West Germany. His portraits of the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition), now part of German photographic history, were immediately bought up by major newspapers and magazines in Germany and abroad, including Time, Life, Der Spiegel and Stern. In 1968, Ruetz covered the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops (Prague Spring) and reported for Stern on the military dictatorship in Greece, as on the World Festival of Youth and Students 1973 and the International Workers' Day 1974 in East Berlin. He later accompanied François Mitterrand on his election campaign, visited Chile after the victory of Salvador Allende and reported on the war in Guinea-Bissau and on many other international events. After spending several years in the United States and Australia, Ruetz began to concentrate increasingly on cultural-historical and documentary projects, such as the exploration of the "visual world" of such figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Theodor Fontane creating series like In Goethe's Footsteps, With Goethe in Switzerland, Me Too in Arcadia/Goethe's Italian Journeys, Fontane's Walks Through Mark Brandenburg. An extensive study of the phenomena of European Necropoles followed. His works after the 1980s deal with the capability of visualizing time and transience. Projects like Second Sight, Timescape and The Perennial Eye, assembled under the main title Eye on Time, document the change of the world's surface during time. In contrast to the individual picture pairs of the Second Sight project, Timescape comprises photographic sequences made over many years. The project consists of more than 300 series of different objects. The photographs already give a clear indication of how much the people, the places, the squares, the apartments, and even nature are in a state of change. What does not change, however, is the geographical vantage point of each photographic series.

Awards

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selected)

Group exhibitions (selected)