No photographing

In 1974 the young Timm Rautert travelled to Pennsylvania to photograph those who normally don’t allow themselves to be photographed: the Amish, a group of Anabaptist Protestant communities. Four years later Rautert returned to America, this time to the Hutterites who live so stringently by the Ten Commandments and the bible’s restrictions on images that they have their identity cards issued without photographs. Both these two series were influential on Rautert’s later work and No Photographing brings them together for the first time. Timm Rautert was born in 1941 in Tuchola, Poland, and studied photography under Otto Steinart at the Folkwang School of Design in Essen from 1966 to 1971. Rautert’s photographs have appeared in many publications, from 1993–2008 he was professor of photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, and in 2008 he was the first photographer to recieve the Lovis Crinth Prize. Rautert’s books with Steidl include Arbeiten (2001), Deutsche in Uniform (2007) and When We Don’t See You, You Don’t See Us Either (2007).