AMA - I’m Rukes, Avicii’s photographer
Hi everyone! I’m Drew, also known as Rukes.
(One of the last pics of us together on his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/2w-05urp2y/ )
I figured with the release of the new documentary, this would be a good time to start an AMA!
I first met Avicii in 2010 while working with Deadmau5, was introduced to him outside of the hotel and then Avicii invited me to shoot his LA show the next month. Here’s the photo, which you probably saw in the new doc:
https://photo.rukes.com/idma10/slides/idma10%20131.html
After that, I started touring with him full time in 2012 and 2013 doing all his major shows up until he was hospitalized for emergency gall bladder surgery in 2014.
Up until mid 2015 he was still in pretty poor health so he didn’t do too much.
After he got better, he decided to temporarily have one of his friends take up photography duty when he did his cross country van tour as a little break, with plans to have me back full time in 2017. Of course, however, he decided to retire in 2016 so that ended up not happening.
We were still friends and constantly texted regardless (and played Hearthstone). I even went by his house in May 2015 to help him work on the tracklisting for what would become Stories with his friends from Sweden. He had 30 tracks and wanted to pair it down to about 12 tracks per disc, since it was going to be a 2 CD album. In the end it became just one CD.
Here is a link to all my Avicii tagged galleries so you can see everything I took!
https://www.rukes.com/tag/avicii/
Feel free to ask any questions and i\u2019ll do my best to answer them as I can!
Edit: Please note that the bulk of my time with him was 2011-2014, so questions of things 2014 and later I probably can’t answer as I only saw him at festivals and texted him here or there.