Timm Rautert (born in 1941) has had an enormous impact on German photography over the last few decades through his work in magazines, such as ZEITmagazin, Stern, GEO as well as other publications, his exhibitions and, last but not least, through his professorship at the Academy of Graphic and Book Arts in Leipzig from 1993-2007.

His work focuses both on the constantly changing image of human beings as well as questioning the nature of photographic processes.

As a student, Rautert undertook his first journeys abroad to Japan and to the USA. These resulted in photo-documentary reports that were published in the German press. From 1974, he worked together with the journalist Michael Holzach for ZEITmagazin, concentrating primarily on social issues. This lasted until Holzach’s tragic death in an accident in 1983. Towards the end of the 1970s, GEO magazine published his comprehensive report on the Hutterites in Canada, continuing his documentation of isolated religious communities, which interested him considerably. He had already worked on a project about the Amish in Pennsylvania in 1974. Along with his journalistic work, Rautert realised a number of projects that were not commissions, such as his series in the early 1970s of pictures taken at Andy Warhol’s Factory and his “Visual Analysis through Photography” series. People-at-work is a central theme in Rautert’s oeuvre: his first report on this topic led him, as a young student in 1968, to the Porsche factory in Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart. His interest in production processes later took him to high-tech companies like Siemens, Nixdorf and Hoechst. In these modern, overly cool-appearing laboratories, Rautert documented the gradual disappearance of human, hands-on labour. Faced with the continual question of how one can use the medium and its effect on the visual world, Timm Rautert moved between different kinds of photography with ease. In the process, he provides viewers with insights into the mental or rather intangible history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

A catalogue of the exhibition has been published through the kind support of the Alfred Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation. It includes 276 pages with 71 colour and 120 black and white photographs. The museum issue is available for €29.

This exhibition was made possible courtesy of the Niedersächsische Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken Foundation.