The Academy of Arts is dedicating a large exhibition with photography by Michael Ruetz to the decade around 1968. Michael Ruetz influenced the image of '68 as did hardly any other artist. Many of his photographs are a part of our visual memory. However, Ruetz is far more than merely the reporter of this period in time. As a student of Sinology, he grew into the role of the documentary-maker as an active part of a movement. His pictures live from this proximity to the events, from a feeling for situations and the view of people: in the 130 photographs, mainly black and white, the emotionality of the period at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s comes to life again.

The exhibition not only documents the dynamics of the political movement of '68. It shows the protagonists of this period from Dutschke to Beuys, the bourgeois spiritual climate of West Germany as well as the staged public space of the GDR. But first of all the pictures especially open up one's view onto a world in upheaval and movement, a climate of liberation and emancipation. The photographs from Greece, Rome, Angola and Chile represent this.

A wide-ranging book accompanying the exhibition will be issued by Steidl Verlag Göttingen.

In cooperation with the Goethe Institute