You’ve heard the joke about music criticism. It’s like dancing about architecture. There’s something similar about trying to use words to capture a man who had mastered the art, the heft, and the weight of the image.
Heinz Kluetmeier, who died on Jan. 14 at the age of 82 due to complications with Parkinson's disease and a stroke, didn’t take photos, he gave photos. Putting into the public domain visual gems that told stories, evoked feelings, memorialized events, and sometimes, literally, reset limits of possibility.
Heinz was born in Berlin and spent his early years in Bremen, but at age 9, moved to the guts of America … to Milwaukee; he even attended a high school named for George Custer. Just as he spoke two languages and toggled between two cultures, Heinz was both an athlete and an aesthete. He captained the school’s tennis team and was a varsity swimmer. When he wasn’t the subject of sports photos, he was fashioning them himself. At the ripe age of 15, he was on the sidelines, shooting Green Bay Packers games. Still a teenager, he found creative positions in convention halls, shooting the 1960 presidential campaign.
There are no hard, fast rules about making it in America. But when you have a portfolio featuring Vince Lombardi and John F. Kennedy before you’re old enough to drink one of Milwaukee’s Finest, you’ve done well finding a sense of place.
Because he needed still another sector to conquer, Heinz attended Dartmouth as an engineering major. This was at the behest of his father, skeptical, as he was, that photography could double as a career. Heinz graduated from Dartmouth in 1965 and worked for two years with Inland Steel. But he could never shake photography—the shutterbug, as it were.
After freelancing for the Associated Press, Heinz joined the staff of the Milwaukee Journal. In 1969, before he had turned 30, Heinz was poached by Time Inc. to work as a photographer for Life and Sports Illustrated. Heinz returned to Germany in 1972 to shoot the Munich Olympics. He was eating with swimmer Mark Spitz during the terrorist attack. He got up—no doubt paying the check first—grabbed his gear, and went to work. And his images from those tragic games would endure.
More happily, in 1980, Heinz was both at the side of the rink and in the rafters—this was not someone who was ever satisfied sticking to one position—shooting the “Miracle On Ice,” the Americans’ dramatic upset of the Soviets in that Lake Placid hockey game. The cover of Sports Illustrated featured Heinz’s handiwork, but no headline or caption, because as he put it, “it didn’t need any window dressing, everyone in America knew what had happened.”
Heinz took photos that no one even thought to take—much less were able to execute. He would find an angle no one had conceived. He would seize on a detail no one else would notice. Writers loved to work with him, yes for his companionability and his dexterity. But also because Heinz would develop a rapport with the athlete and uncover a detail that would make its way into the written story. And the Legend of Kluetmeier extended to the way he transferred his images. Today it’s a few keystrokes. In the 1970s and ’80s, Heinz would sometimes transport his film back to the office himself, a pilot license another of his achievements.
Trained engineer that he was, Heinz had a knack for marrying art with science. He had a photographer’s feel, a sixth sense for getting the shot. But he also mastered technology and the mechanics of the set-up. A pioneer in underwater photography, he was the first to experiment with an underwater camera at the international competitions during the 1991 world swimming championships in Perth.
The next year, he became the first photographer to place a camera underwater to capture an Olympic swimming event, in Barcelona. Heinz might be best known for an underwater photo at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his image confirming that Michael Phelps won the 100m butterfly by .01 seconds. Everyone remembers technology; what gets lost in the retelling: It was a technically perfect photo.
That wasn’t even Heinz’s favorite Phelps photo. That would be the shot that Heinz—who was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2017, the first photographer ever to be so honored—took when Phelps was still a student at the University of Michigan, depicting the swimmer floating near his dorm room desk. The photo was for the cover of the little-seen and now-defunct SI On Campus, a reminder that Heinz was happy to pursue any subject—from a Super Bowl down to a random motocross race—for any medium, so long as there was a compelling story to be captured.
Heinz had a magic eye, able to capture moments and nuances that eluded even the best of his colleagues. Heinz had a silver tongue, no less a word than charming would describe an interaction with him. Heinz also had a winning set of ears. At dinner, at meetings and in social gatherings, he would tell the jokes and dictate the terms, but he also listened. He listened to friends, and reacted accordingly. He listened to subjects and managed to convey what they said into the photos he would then take. He listened to coworkers and addressed their concerns, often much later down the line.
For so much of his life, Heinz had the stout body of an athlete. And the fearlessness, too, which enabled him to take so many physical risks … and candidly, add a layer of sad irony to his latter years, when a stroke robbed him of all that physicality.
Let’s be clear: Heinz could be fierce. Woe to the security guard or self-important usher who tried to displace him. Woe to whoever was in his way when he tried to get a shot—at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Heinz nearly plowed over the high jumper Dwight Stones while trying to get across the infield and take a photo of Mary Decker after she’d been inadvertently tripped by Zola Budd. Woe the fellow photographer who encroached on his position while shooting. At the ’72 Games, Heinz had a run-in with—no joke—Leni Riefenstahl when she was too aggressive with her space. Woe to the SI editor—or member of his staff—who disagreed with him on a point in which he felt certain. Which was most points.
But Heinz leavened hard with soft. If he was opinionated, he was also open-minded. He came back to the SI offices after taking a cover portrait—one of more than 150—of Caitlyn Jenner. She was “as sweet a woman as he was a man,” he said shrugging.
He was wonderful company—no matter the context, no matter the hours. He didn’t just know the best places to eat (and drink) the world over; he didn’t just know the owner and maitre d’. He remembered some detail about them that made them feel special.
Likewise, Heinz didn’t offer to take portraits of staffers and their families in his loft; he demanded it. He didn’t offer guidance and mentorship; he actively foisted it on those lucky enough to be in his orbit.
It’s still difficult to reconcile that someone so full of life is no longer with us. But his work lives on, thousands of words for thousands of images. And up there, someone is telling angels how to use a Nikon D4, how to angle for the best images, how to get the film back to the office without getting on a commercial flight ... and all the while, he is smiling generously.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI Photographer Heinz Kluetmeier’s Eye for the Iconic Made Him One of a Kind.