Didier Ruef - Life and Career

Life and Career

Didier Ruef was born in Geneva, Switzerland on July 15, 1961 and has dual nationality, Swiss and Italian. He graduated from the University of Geneva, where he studied Economics (1981–1984).

In 1985, Ruef went to New York, where he obtained a diploma (1986) in photojournalism at the International Center of Photography (ICP). It was there that he developed his long-term essay of the life of a Puerto Rican family in Spanish Harlem, for which he won the Yann Geoffroy Prize in Milan in 1990. These photographs were exhibited at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1990.

Since returning to Switzerland in 1987, Ruef started to work as a freelance documentary photographer and photojournalist and has visited all five continents, with a preference for Africa. He has worked on various stories on the human condition in black & white and color.

Ruef was a member of Network Photographers Agency in London from 1991 to 1997. He was a founding member in September 2002 of the Swiss photo agency, Pixsil, which he left in July 2009. Today he works as a freelance photographer. He is also represented by the photo agencies Cosmos in France, Luz Photo Agency Visum in Germany and Bildbyran Silver in Scandinavia.

Ruef has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Heks (Interchurch Aid), Swiss Red Cross, the Syngenta Foundation and the World Council of Churches.

Ruef's pictures are published in numerous magazines and newspapers in Europe, Asia and Northern America.

He won the King Albert Memorial Foundation Prize in 2000 for his book on Swiss mountain farmers (Bauern am Berg, Paysans de nos montagnes, Vita di montagna). This award, among other prizes, was the culmination of a long-term personal project which began in 1993 and completed in 1997. It was made possible with the support of Pro Helvetia for the photography and book in 1998, and an itinerant exhibition which toured Switzerland, Italy, Singapore and Jordan between 1999 and 2002.

In 2000 and 2001, Ruef was commissioned by the Swiss branch of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for an extensive photographic report on daily life in six African countries. These pictures, together with those from numerous other African essays form the basis of a book Afrique Noire, published in 2005. An itinerant exhibition toured Switzerland and France between 2005 and 2007.

In 2007, he was commissioned by the Swiss Foundation DiDé, Dignité en Détention, for a book Enfants Prisonniers on the minors’ jail in Gitarama, Rwanda.

Since 1991, he has also been involved in a personal project worldwide on the relationship between Man and Waste. He has shot twenty photo essays and has finally published in 2011 the book Recycle, Labor et Fides (French-English) and Edizioni Casagrande (Italian-German).