Michael Ruetz

Through his photographs Michael Ruetz has defined the legendary year 1968 as no other artist. Participating actively in the movement of 1968, the at the time Sinology student, Michael Ruetz, became in time a correspondent and documentarist.

The exhibition’s 44 black and white photographs form a photographic timetable. From the seat-out in the Free University of Berlin on June 22nd 1966 up until the “box with his notes” of the pioneering writer Arno Schmidt, which was photographed by the end of May 1975, the pictures of the exhibition are proof of the season of big changes and inversions.

This photographic “timetable”, however, is not a limited documentation of the 1968 movement. It extends to political and artistic leading forms as that of Willy Brandt, Rudi Dutschke or Joseph Beuys, it explores the line between dictatorship and democratic development, the essence of urban Western Germany and the staged public space of Eastern.

The lens of Michael Ruetz condenses historical situations in diachronic pictures, but also conceives daily moments, capturing a feeling of life that is now long lost. Above all the photographs of Michael Ruetz reveal that particular climate of inversion and new start, release and emancipation. The report was created in collaboration with the Academy of Arts of Berlin.