Time Unveiled 1965 to 1995

The Rooms of the Exhibition

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

Room 1 - Germans

From 1964 to 1976 Michael Ruetz gathered material for his cycle German Characters, portraying what he saw in Germany and what this country meant to him. He turned his eyes on both East and West Germany, on historic as well as contemporary phenomena. While students were calling for rebellion against democratic institutions in the West, people in the GDR pursued their private lives somewhere in the shadow of state-run May Day parades and sport festivals.

The arrangement of the photographs does not attempt to show them in chronological or politico-historical context, but rather to evoke striking aesthetic analogies and associations.

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

Room 2 - Life and Death

The series Life and Death starts with photographs taken at Auschwitz concentration camp, which Michael Ruetz began to study in the late 1960s. The photographs shown in the exhibition are among the earliest to take up the topic of Auschwitz after 1945.

In the mid 1970s, the photographer ventured into the heart of the earthquake zone in Peru and later took his camera to war-torn Guinea-Bissau. His photographs of the people living in these trouble spots are made with great discretion and sympathy for the inhabitants. As he came to understand that the hasty, perfunctory production of pictures demanded by the media never really helps the people affected, Ruetz lost interest in journalism. He then turned to the topics of "Time" and "Ephemerality" - to the passing of all things.

Life and Death was the first project in which Ruetz took up his new subject matter. In 1978, a selection of photographs was published in book form under the title Nekropolis (City of the Dead). His documentation of cemeteries is an ongoing project.

The exhibition shows Nekropoles from the Mediterranean world. For reasons of discretion the exact locations are not named. Life and Death demonstrates how the living, in the design of their cemeteries, imagine a community in which they would like to remain after death, a place to "live", to work, to love.

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

Room 3 - Time Unveiled I - Second Sight

Michael Ruetz derived his so-called "rephotographic method" from his studies of the visual world of the painter Caspar David Friedrich as well as that of such authors and poets as Theodor Fontane, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Dylan Thomas. For the Second Sight project, he returns some 30 years later to places he photographed in the 1960s; there he photographs the exact same motifs, from the exact same vantage point, again. The pairs of photographs which result from this process represent time, ephemerality and memory, but above all they record changes in our visible environment. They show how much has been lost, and how much gained.

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

Room 4 - Time Unveiled II - Timescape

Michael Ruetz began his project Timescape in 1975. His original aim was to create a reliable instrument with which the changes wrought by time could be visualised and which could also provide a solid basis for rephotographic studies continuing on into the future. In contrast to the individual picture pairs of the Second Sight project, Timescape comprises photographs made during several - up to a maximum of 25 - phases. The peroid of observation is limited to 25 years. The project is to be completed around the year 2015 and currently 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 and the name originally given to the object photographed.

The different Timescape series consist primarily of examples from Germany, or rather the central part of Europe. They cover an area bordered on the west by Rotterdam, Bautzen in the east, Carolinensiel in the north and the Brenner Valley in the south. Within this large area there are many hundred of fixed points - 177 of them in Berlin alone - from which the chosen objects are photographed at regular intervals.

The Deutsches Historisches Museum exhibits a selection largely consisting of photographs taken in the Berlin area, because the Berlin part of the Timescape project most clearly represents the intentions of the artist.

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

Room 5 - Time Unveiled III - The Perennial Eye

The concepts behind the projects Second Sight and Timescape are further developed in The Perennial Eye. All three projects share the idea of replacing the fleeting glance by continuous, intensive - short, "perennial" - observation.

Correspondingly, Max Beckmann's words could be the motto for this work: "If you want to grasp the unfathomable, penetrate as deeply as you can into the fathomable." For Timescape Ruetz set the maximum number of phases during which an object is observed at 25. With The Perennial Eye there is no limit to the number of phases.

The project was begun in 1989. It currently comprises 401 pictures and will be reduced to 144 plus 12 in its final stage. The examples presented here are typical for the complete body concerning light and colour.

room 1 room 2 room 3 room 4 room 5

HomePage Up Mail Impressum Guestbook