overview

In this series of construction workers portraits, Tooten transform local and migrant workers
who are often overlooked as anonymous into people with pride and dignity.
Their life is always at risk during their work at building sites.

Despite the hooded mask, these laborers suffer from dust, noise, pollution and hardship.
For the Bangkok Art Biennale, Tooten’s portraits of construction workers are placed at public
sights such as department stores and in high-rise buildings, as reminder that the labor workers are the essential part of a system that built the Bangkok, we are all living in today.

In 2013, Tooten’s installation R.C.A., series of gigantic portraits of Thai construction workers in numerous public spaces around Ratchaburi,
transforming this small town in central Thailand into an open air gallery.

In 2018, Tooten was selected as one of the Artists for the first Bangkok Art Biennale by Artistic Director Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda and this curator team,
to display and screen this Worker Portrait photographs + Videos all over multiple locations within Bangkok.

The ocean can be a beast in the day time, but at night it becomes a near-mythical creature we can only guess at.

It’s always been with us but it’s never been seen as in the new image series of German photographer Ralf Tooten who has been out on the beaches of
-Japan,
-Bali,
-Thailand,
-Malaysia
-Maldives
in an on-going project to capture moments that have never been shot before.

And herein rests the genius of Ralf Tooten’s series of portraits of these workers currently on show in public spaces around Ratchaburi, a typical small town in central Thailand.

His work celebrates a section of Thai society that has hardly any voice or recognition.

(by Tom Vater )

„AWC“ plays with this approach without trying to venture out onto the thin ice of claiming to be art. In his new work,
Ralf Tooten, a German photographer who has been living in Bangkok for more than 4 years, provides a fascinating look at the „worker bees“ of globalization.

“AWC” stands for “Asian Workers Covered,” for a species that we mostly see only from afar on Asia’s gigantic, anarchic-Babylonian construction sites.

Tooten’s photos seem like electron-microscopically enhanced images of strange insects, almost as if he had used a macrolens.

( by Peter Bialobrzeski )

Enthralled by the exotic aesthetics of the Asian megalopolis, Tooten has spent years documenting the city’s after dark activity, which he published in the 2009 book, Bangkok Noir. Now with the support of the Goethe Institute and under the curatorial guidance of Ver Gallery director Josef Ng, Tooten has transferred his shadowy diary into an atmospheric multimedia exhibition at the National Gallery.

For the book’s compilation, Tooten collaborated with well-known German television presenter and writer Roger Willemsen. Assuming a vampirish schedule that commenced at sundown, for months the two would prowl the nightscape attempting to scratch beneath the neon glow to unravel the layered complexities of this rapidly developing conurbation.

Why do we need the ‘Psoriasis: The Naked Truth’ campaign? 

Psoriasis is not only skin deep: 

As you know, psoriasis is a very distressing, chronic condition of the immune system. The
characteristic thickened red patches of skin covered by a silvery white scale can occur on any part of the body.

The Naked Truth, a new pan-European educational programme to expose the physical and emotional impact of living with psoriasis, launches today.

The center piece of the programme is a photo exhibit that captures the experience of living with psoriasis through portrait photography by award winning photographer Ralf Tooten and features the personal stories of men and women living with the disease.

“One cannot photograph the aura. Ralf Tooten can. His photos from the spiritual world are saturated with experience and immaterial at the same time. What is most precious

about them is the inner space that they point out; a realm that, in this book, is inhabited by the community of all who see with the eyes of wisdom. Someone who is able to

produce such photographs must also have such eyes.” ( by Roger Willemsen )

– Tin Drum Movie
In the year 1978 Movie, Director Volker Schlöndorff and Author Günter Grass gave Ralf Tooten the incredible chance to be part at their Movie Production of
Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum.

– Ultra Man Go To Countryside
In 2007 Ralf Tooten created the serial “ Ultra Man goes Countryside “ which follow the logline, that a Thai Super Hero, leaves the city in order to rather take care himself, his friends and family instead of get involved in political unrest.

– Die Goldenen Zitronen
This body of work from the late 90 arose from Ralf Tooten’s friendship and collaboration with the German Artist Gustav Kluge and the Produzenten Galerie in Hamburg, Germany.

This body of work from the late 90 arose from Ralf Tooten’s friendship and collaboration with the German Artist Gustav Kluge and the Produzenten Galerie in Hamburg, Germany.

His photography of the atmosphere in the Ateliere of Gustav Kluge and the photographed portraits of the models which Painter Gustav Kluge created where accompanied in the Exhibition Catalogue and later get awarded by the Polaroid fine arts award in London.

Young Russian Soldiers in East Germany,
one week after the Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989
/ silver gelatin printing 1989