COLOGNE.- Timm Rautert is widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary German photographers, a figure who has influenced the decisive trends in photography since the early 1960s. Whether working as a photojournalist in his early career, as a portraitist, as a chronicler of a rapidly changing working world, or later as a university educator, Rautert has continually reshaped our understanding of what photography can be. Driven by the question of the power of images and their impact on society, he is constantly probing new ways to assert and examine the medium’s meaning.
This interrogative approach was already evident in his “Bildanalytische Photographie” (“Image-Analytical Photography”) series from 1968 to 1974. Here, Rautert began a lifelong project of encircling photography as a highly complex visual and communicative medium, asking questions that go well beyond matters of composition and design. Part of his concept is the acknowledgment that photography always manages to slip away, to elude final definition and evaporate into something more elusive. He understands that the camera simultaneously opens up views onto life and obscures them, reflecting a tension at the core of the photographic act.
Two recent exhibitions underscore these themes: “Dots always work. Neue Montagen” in Cologne and “Vier Spiegel und ein Stein. Fotografische Serien und Installationen” in Bonn. Both explore the dynamics of seeing and being seen in contexts of appropriation and power. They also address the question of revisiting and reappropriating one’s own more than 50-year photographic history. A comprehensive retrospective of his work at the Museum Folkwang was aptly titled “Die Leben der Fotografie” (“The Lives of Photography”), highlighting Rautert’s engagement with the constant shifts in meaning that occur as images circulate through social, cultural, and symbolic practices. Photography’s oscillation between evidence and construction renders it a “shifter”—an element whose significance cannot be defined without the message it conveys.
This conceptual interplay is evident in works where photography, in its documentary, indexical quality, effectively nullifies itself. For instance, when Rautert “reproduces” Hans Holbein’s Renaissance painting of Lais of Corinth, the legendary, highly paid courtesan of antiquity, he draws attention to the difference between iconic painting and the supposed neutrality of photography. In the art-historical discourse on Holbein’s painting, even the value of coins depicted before the courtesan is contested—where cheap reproductions might be mistaken for gold—prompting Rautert to delve into the fatal interplay of beauty, money, and power.
In his new series “Dots always work,” Rautert references the worldwide Louis Vuitton campaign with artist Yayoi Kusama. Against backdrops of high fashion, supermodels, and infinite polka dots intended to dispel a global sense of dread, Rautert inserts images of modern fighter jets, thereby reintroducing unacknowledged realities. By stamping his own dots onto the imagery, he directly challenges luxury’s polished veneer and reclaims the symbol for his own critical commentary.
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