Artist's Bio

Dirk Reinartz was born in 1947 in Aachen and died on a trip to Berlin in 2004.
He studied photography with Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen. From 1971 to 1977 he worked as a photo reporter at Stern magazine. His many travels for the magazine took him all over the world, covering the five continents. In 1977 he joined the photographers’ collective VISUM, which he left again in 1982 in order to work independently.

Reinartz’ photographs focused mainly on social themes and artist portraits. His reportage work appeared in several magazines, including Life, Fortune, Der Spiegel, the SZ-Magazin and particularly the Zeit-Magazin and Art. He began publishing his work in book form in 1985, producing a total of 20 volumes.

Dirk Reinartz’ photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions; his project “deathly still,” for example, has been on view to date in 25 locations worldwide, among them Berlin, New York, Warsaw and Santiago de Chile.


New York (1974)

These vintage prints, were made from photographs the artist took during two trips to New York in 1974.

Expressive faces and fascinating views of the US metropolis, accentuated by the play of light and shadow in the black-and-white photographs. The pictures are still capable today of immersing the viewer in the atmosphere of 1970s New York.
Reinartz sought out places where people wander the streets lonely and silent, with a resigned air; or where, caught behind shop windows, they turn their backs on others. These city dwellers have a haunting kind of melancholy and speechlessness that appears to permeate life in New York. The skyscrapers rise up steeply, turning the streets into dark canyons – lined up one after the other in the fog, they intensify the misery evident in what was once the land of opportunity.
In the midst of the oil shortage, the Vietnam War and the associated recession, with rising unemployment and a never-ending series of political scandals, Americans in the 1970s found themselves facing a deep identity crisis. Dirk Reinartz captured this mood in sensitive pictorial compositions that not only show the pervasive tristesse of the times, but also include snapshot-like character studies that reflect back his warm and affectionate gaze.


Richard Serra - Sculptures

The meeting between the photographer Dirk Reinartz and the sculptor Richard Serra in 1983 soon gave rise to mutual admiration. Reinartz began traveling all over the world to photograph Serra’s landscape installations and public sculptures, an activity he pursued until his untimely death in 2004. The fascinating black-and-white photographs became the basis for sculpture books that Reinartz compiled in close cooperation with Serra, for example “Afangar,” 1991, “La Mormaire,” 1997 and “Lemgo Vectors,” 1998. For the catalogue raisonnée “Sculpture 1985-1998,” Reinartz spent long years journeying to far-flung sculptural installations across the globe in order to document them for this publication, today long since out of print. Richard Serra described this in a conversation with Lynn Cook on the occasion of his retrospective in summer 2007 at the MOMA New York as follows: „Photography is an extension of my eye. Dirk Reinartz became an eye for me. We travelled together a lot and I miss working with him.“
Beyond their documentary value, Dirk Reinartz’s photographs develop their own aesthetic, with an idiosyncratic choice of perspective and the rich nuances afforded by black-and-white photography. The way the photographer chose to depict the individual sculptures mirrors his own subjective experience of the works. Exactly as intended by Richard Serra, Reinartz as observer becomes the moving center of the work, demonstrating to other viewers the diversity of the respective landscape or sculptural space. At the same time, he conveys a deeper understanding of Serra’s sculptural work, with its objects that continually change in appearance, each time challenging the viewer’s perception anew.