The Photographer Dirk Reinartz
"The very best thing about light, however, is its other side the shadow. For me, probably even more important than the light itself." (Dirk Reinartz 1994)
Dirk Reinartz's career began in the early 1970s, when he started working for stern while still a photography student under Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen. From 1971 to 1977, Dirk Reinartz shot extensive reportages for the Hamburg magazine and quickly became known as a creative photographer with a distinctive visual language, producing photo series from Greenland, Indonesia, and the USA, as well as insightful documentary shots and high-contrast portraits.
In 1977, Dirk Reinartz left stern and joined the young agency VISUM. Founded in 1975 by three of his fellow students from the Folkwang School of Design in Essen, André Gelpke, Gerd Ludwig, and Rudi Meisel, the agency had a significantly more social documentary focus than the major news magazine, and Dirk Reinartz now concentrated largely on social issues and aspects of everyday life in Germany. He attentively followed the traces that the division of Germany and reunification left on people's everyday lives. His critical perspective is evident in the many photo series he continued to publish in stern and Merian, but above all in ZEITmagazin and art.
After moving to Buxtehude near Hamburg in 1982, his documentary photography and magazine publications were increasingly accompanied by extensive, independent series of works in black and white, but also in color. For years, he pursued questions and visual typologies, which he published as excellent illustrated books, primarily with Steidl in Göttingen. His keen sense of historical context and sharp humor, with which he examines the peculiarities of Germany and the German people and makes them visible to the viewer, are evident in Kein schöner Land (1989), Besonderes Kennzeichen: Deutsch (1990), Deutschland durch die Bank (1997) or Innere Angelegenheiten (2003), but also in Bismarck: Vom Verrat der Denkmäler (1991). Reinartz was concerned with exploring German identity with all its fractures and contradictions, its historical roots, and its reorientation after 1989. He was interested in the mental states and sensitivities, sociopolitical developments, and cultural peculiarities of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the situation in the GDR and German-German relations were also repeatedly the subject of his photographic work. In his publications, his reportage photography developed an independent narrative layer parallel to the text, conveying complementary content information.
His continued intensive travel activity – with a short interruption in the years after 1978 – was reflected, among other things, in the illustrated books Die Reise nach Pommern in Bildern (1987), Bismarck in America (2000) and, compiled posthumously by Karin Reinartz based on his originals, New York 1974 (2007).
Particularly noteworthy is Dirk Reinartz's series of works, totenstill, published as a book in 1994 and exhibited widely around the world. Featuring a large number of photographs from the sites of Nazi concentration camps, totenstill is a typological examination of the theme of mass murder based on the structural relics of the camps and today's memorials in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, France, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Reinartz photographed these places as silent yet eloquent architectures, as deserted sites that as such evoke the painful absence. With his silent images of desolate camp ruins and minimal artifacts from the events between 1939 and 1945, he traces the echoes of the Holocaust. His series conveys an inkling of the unimaginable horror of this immense crime, the murder of more than 6 million Jews and other persecuted people.
Dirk Reinartz's visual language is characterized by an often architectural composition, a deliberate use of contrasts, and the recurring use of cropping, some of which can be traced back to his time as a student of Otto Steinert. These formal design principles also inform his intensive engagement with the steel sculptures and installations of Richard Serra, for whom he has documented not only the installation views but also the production process in foundries and steelworks worldwide since 1983.
From 1998 until his early death in 2004, Dirk Reinartz taught as a professor of photography at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel.
Dirk Reinartz's extensive archive is jointly maintained by the F.C. Gundlach Foundation and the Deutsche Fotothek Dresden. The jointly conceived Archiv der Fotografen der Deutschen Fotothek presents more than 2,000 digitized images from his work online.
