Konrad Rufus Müller was born on March 22, 1940, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. His childhood was shaped by war and post-war experiences, such as the Berlin Blockade of 1947/48, and by Jesuit life philosophy. In 1960, at the age of 20, he discovered an old Rolleiflex in his parents' linen closet. At the time, he did not yet realize that he had found not just a camera, but his calling.
With his father's pre-war medium format camera (made in 1935), he took his first photo of a prominent man during the general audience at Saint Peter's on Easter Sunday 1960. Pope John XXIII is his photographic primal portrait, which he still carries with him today. Blurry, shaky, and severely underexposed. Five years after this premiere, in 1965, he took the first shots of another prominent man: the now-famous portraits of Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. Müller felt the fascination for Adenauer while still a student at the Berlin University of Fine Arts (HfBK), where he studied free painting under Professor Hans Jaenisch in 1962. He later turned his back on studying painting and taught himself photography as an artistic form of expression.
Adenauer remains the starting point for an ongoing artistic engagement with German chancellors, powerful political figures, extraordinary people, and strong personalities. Konrad Rufus Müller, as the only photographer, had all German chancellors in front of his camera - including Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel. He also photographed statesmen like Bruno Kreisky, Anwar el Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Francois Mitterrand, as well as artists, entertainers, and actors from Friedrich Dürrenmatt to Thomas Gottschalk. But Müller also captured other milieus in his work - farming families in Lech, craftsmen, or Gratian, a man considered by the inhabitants of a Romanian village in the Carpathians to be a werewolf.
Müller's work is rounded off by still lifes, landscape portraits, and city views, as well as reportages, for example, for the magazines of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and DIE ZEIT, for STERN, Profil, L'Express, and Time Magazine.
ACCESS TO PHOTOGRAPHY & WORKING METHODS
In the 60s and 70s, Konrad Rufus Müller did not yet earn his living with photography. He financed himself with city tours in Berlin, lectures for guests of the All-German Institute, and by looking after young people on trips with the German-French Youth Office. His first encounters with chancellors were all self-organized; he had no commission for them and received no fee. This made him completely independent in his photographic work and defined his own role in subjective valuation. This approach has shaped his type of photography to this day. It's not the documentation of public appearances and gestures, but rather his own view of the people in front of his lens that is the subject of his work.
Also distinctive is his stubborn method of working. Müller used his father's old Rolleiflex until 1975 and has since used a subsequent model. He works only with "available light," the existing light, exclusively in black and white, always analog, and always alone. With the patience of a hunter, he waits for the right moment - light, position, expression, everything has to fit. He "...waits so long until that one moment has come. Then he presses the shutter. Maybe he presses a second and a third time, but then he has the picture. THE picture. And it will have the effect of a painting." (SZ Magazin, March 21, 2011).
For the right picture, he rarely uses more than one roll of film, pressing the shutter no more than 12 times - an exception in the age of the global flood of images. In the tiny darkroom in the basement of his house, he then develops his perfect photography in laborious lab work. The careful work in the darkroom is an integral part of Müller's photographic work. In this way, he gives his subjects the unique expressive power and his pictures the personal touch that has made him famous.