DID YOU KNOW:
Around 2005, Celebrity Photographer, William Rutten, almost lost thousands of original photos he snapped of various celebrities, including all his AALIYAH originals, and it took him 8 years to finally get it all back? Read below for more on this.
On this day, 9 years ago (May 10, 2013), William Rutten shared on his Facebook page that after Aaliyah’s death, Aaliyah’s manager reached out to him to use some of Aaliyah’s photos for the posthumous “Ultimate Aaliyah” CD Box collection. “I was honored and also dumb enough to courier all of my original material from that shoot to them. Those were the slides back then, so I didn’t have a copy of ANYTHING”. Learning of this BIG mistake, he reached out to Blackground to get his’s originals back, but he and his agent were hit with a brick wall due to the label going bankrupt.
To make matters worse, Ruttens English agent was able to locate and retrieve the originals but told him they would not mail them to him (that he had to get them himself in England). Unfortunately, due to a time restraint, Rutten did not make it in time to retrieve his work. “My Agent went bankrupt completely unexpectedly and all my original slides they had in my office (and dozens of other photographers) were confiscated.
Rutten then started to give up that he’d never get his property back. It wasn’t until, by the grace of God, that he received a phone call in December 2012 from a company mediating bankruptcy who advised they discovered boxes in the basement with his name on it and wanted to know if he wanted these boxes back, otherwise they were going in the trash. “If this woman hadn’t been so kind to google and contact me, I would have lost everything for good!”
Rutten shared that this woman mailed the boxes to him, and inside the boxes was all of his work, including all of the photos (including the last session he had with Aaliyah). May of 2013, William Rutten shares a few rares that he was able to retrieve.
Attached is one of those rares (we may never have seen) that he shared in 2013 and more she shared in 2014.