Lukas Ratius was born in Saarbrücken in 1989. Between 2011 and 2017 he studied at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar and holds a diploma in communication design. For his final project "Taranto: Raffo, Cozze e Scontri", he spent six weeks in 2016 documenting the everyday life of a group of soccer fans in Taranto, southern Italy.

Since 2017, he has been working as a freelance photographer on his own projects and photo books or for different clients. His photos have been published in various magazines and newspapers, such as the 11 Freunde magazine, the ZEITmagazin or the Süddeutsche Zeitung (selection). In 2021, Verlag Kettler published the photo book "Der Apparat", in which the small-scale aspects of adminstrative and political networks in the federal state of Saarland are illuminated photographically. Between 2020 and 2021, the documentary "18+ Deutschland – was junge Menschen bewegt" was produced for ARD in collaboration with filmmaker Philipp Majer and in co-production with SR, MDR and rbb. In 2022, Ratius had his first institutional solo exhibition under the title "Der Apparat und andere Geschichten” at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken.

In his free works during long-term documentary observations Lukas Ratius is primarily concerned with the visualization of social mechanisms, networks and structures.