The Berlin based photographer Thomas Rusch with roots in Freiburg moved to Hamburg after graduating from high school, where he trained as a photographer. The first milestone in his career was an award-winning series of backstage portraits in 1987, which he photographed at the first Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival for the news magazine "Stern". In the following year he produced numerous reports and award-winning series and cover photos for "Stern". In the 1990s he spent a lot of time in New York, where he mainly worked in advertising photography. In 1999 he opened his studio in Paris and successfully focused on fashion and beauty photography. He now lives in Germany again.

In 2015 Andrea Bury (ABURY Foundation) and Thomas Rusch founded the PortrAid initiative. An initiative that has meanwhile won several awards, which has set itself the goal of using photography to help where it is necessary to create an understanding of the problem and to build an emotional bridge between the giver and the recipient.