Philipp Rittermann began photographing in Hannover, Germany, where he co-founded a photography gallery and taught photography. His work is featured in over one hundred public, private and corporate collections ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, France.
Featured nationally and internationally in forty solo and over fifty group exhibitions, he frequently gives lectures and workshops. His work has been published in numerous books and magazines. In 2001, in conjunction with a mid-career retrospective, the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego published a monograph of his work titled “Navigating by Light.”
“I find photographs that prompt me to ask questions more thought provoking than ones which tell all at a glance. When making selective focus Dioramas, I strive to distill evocative, ambiguous images out of my surroundings. Like intriguing books or movies I hope they cause the viewer to linger while pondering what they are looking at. These Dioramas deliberately obfuscate much detail and information, and concentrate ones gaze on minutiae. They explain little, leaving questions like ‘What is it?’, ‘Where is it?’, ‘How big is it?’, ‘How far is it?’, ‘Did the photographer build this?’ open to speculation.”