Co-founder and managing director
Ralf Armbrüster
Martin is the artist and teacher you see in every lesson. There is a second pair of hands behind the Academy, and they belong to Ralf. He built the platform this runs on, he runs the business from Germany, and he hosts every Open Mic session.
Who he is
The engine room behind the Academy
While Martin is the artist and teacher you see in every lesson, there is a second pair of hands behind the Art Photography Academy. Ralf Armbrüster is a software engineer, the founder of the German automation company intellicon, and Martin's business partner.
Ralf takes care of everything that lets Martin focus on photography. The technology behind the Academy, student onboarding, the marketing, the campaigns, most of the webinars, and the systems that keep everything running reliably in the background.
He also hosts every Open Mic session, which is the part of the week most students would tell you they look forward to.
He is the reason there is a platform at all
Every class had its own WhatsApp group and all of them were on Martin's phone. Ralf told him what he needed was a proper home for them. That was the day the Academy was born.
And the reason it keeps running
Accounts, access, payments, the library, the community, the emails that go out at the right moment. None of it is glamorous and all of it has to work.
In his own words
It only got good when I met Martin
My first contact with photography was at school, where I was the photographer for our school newspaper. Photography stayed with me as a hobby for decades. But honestly, it only got good when I met Martin.
My wife Andrea and I discovered South Africa in 2005, when a family invitation first brought us to Cape Town, and we have returned almost every year since. On those trips we kept taking photography courses with Martin, year after year. What began as holiday lessons more than a decade ago grew into a close friendship.
When Martin later struggled to keep his growing groups of students connected through scattered WhatsApp chats, I did what I do professionally. I built him a proper platform. That platform grew into the Art Photography Academy, and today I am proud to run the engine room behind it from Germany, so Martin can do what only he can do, which is teach.
And Andrea? She never stopped either. Today she is an exhibiting fine art photographer herself, with her work shown at the Osner Gallery.
Win back lifetime. Enable growth. Guarantee stability.
Three lines guide Ralf's company, intellicon. He builds tools that free people from routine work a machine can do better, so that humans can spend their time on what only they can do, which is create, decide, teach and live. The Art Photography Academy is that mission applied to art education. Martin teaches, and the machine handles the rest.
Where he fits
Three people, and none of them optional
Martin makes the work and teaches it. Samantha carries the digital half and co-hosts the Open Mic. Ralf makes sure all of it reaches you and keeps working.
Martin
The artist and teacher
Thirty five years of teaching, a college he founded, and a gallery of his own. He wrote every technique the Academy teaches.
Read Martin's storySamantha
The digital half
An exhibiting artist who teaches Photoshop for the Artist, runs the branding, and is the reason any of this went online.
Read Samantha's storyRalf
The engine room
The platform, the onboarding, the webinars and the Open Mic. Built in Germany, running quietly behind everything you see.
Questions about the platform
Partnerships, or anything to do with the technology behind the Academy, go straight to Ralf.
Email Ralf