Michael Schmidt’s Present
Now is the time to discover, thanks to the Jeu de Paume exhibition (June 8th —August 29th, 2021), the work of German photographer Michael Schmidt (1945-2014), never before shown in France. It reveals “a different German photography” from that the Bechers and their students from the Düsseldorf School produced at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. With the demand for constant renewal.
There are several ways of approaching Schmidt’s photography, which is little known because of the limited number of exhibitions outside Germany, both during his lifetime and since, and because his books, which haven’t circulated much in France, are now almost all out of print. The retrospective at the Jeu de Paume will remedy this to some extent. Coming from the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin via the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, then the Albertina in Vienna, it was conceived, with the photographer’s last assistant, Laura Bieslau, by one of his best connoisseurs since the late 1980s,Thomas Weski, curator since 2015 of the Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst mit Archiv Michael Schmidt, an institution founded in Hanover in 1999, which preserves the collection donated by Schmidt in exchange for an annuity, which enabled him to complete his last projects.
The impressive catalogue Michael Schmidt. Photographs 1965-2014 (1) provides an overview of the corpus, arranged chronologically by series, from the first images in the mid1960s and the project Berlin Kreuzberg (1973), devoted to the district where he was born and lived until his death, to the final Le
bensmittel [Foodstuffs] (2014), which for the first time includes colour. In addition to the photographs, the book shows how they were presented and distributed, in the form of books often designed by the photographer, and exhibitions in which the selection of works and the way they were hung also varied, by his own choice, according to the venues that hosted them. It is therefore a valuable reference work for its iconographic and documentary wealth.
BERLIN
It is also of value for the quality of the contributions it brings together, those of specialists and fellow travellers, including Ute Eskildsen, who organised Schmidt’s first retrospective at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 1995; but also Peter Galassi, who presented the photographs of Waffenruhe [Ceasefire] (1987) at MoMA in NewYork from 1988-89, and in 1996 devoted a monographic exhibition ther— the first by a German photographer in this museum for decades —to his major work EIN-HEIT [UNITY] (1991-94), acquired in the process.
These texts provide an indispensable contextualisation, explaining the photographer’s roots in Berlin, where he took most of his photographs. He was a police officer when in 1965 he discovered a camera in a colleague’s locker, and trained himself, joining the German Federation of Amateur Photographers’ Clubs. Four years later he was teaching photography at the BerlinKreuzberg adult education centre and was commissioned by the mayor to produce his first book of photographs, which documented the district. In 1973 he became self-employed, and from then on was responsible for financing his projects. In 1976 he founded the Werkstatt für Photographie (Photography Workshop) as part of the Kreuzberg adult education centre. That same year, working on the district of Wedding, he structured his project in two parts: urban landscapes, then their inhabitants, in order to show “places accessible to all” and “the human being not in isolation, but in their environment”. As Galassi points out, the city would inspire the photographer to produce several books expressing distinct approaches, including Berlin Nach 45 [Berlin After 45] (2005), which brings together images partly exhibited in Essen in 1995, and made since the early 1980s. In 1996 Schmidt said: “I could also take photos somewhere else; I just wouldn’t know why.”
GREY, SERIES
Though the link between the photographer and his city is essential, it is also important to appreciate the evolution of his gaze in his successive projects, with the power of invention augmented by their formatting. Thomas Weski examines this in his excellent essay ‘A permanent process of mutation’.
In 2004 Schmidt gave an interview to Dietmar Elger: this was published and translated into English in the catalogue of the exhibition Irgendwo [Somewhere] (2005). In it, he explains the reasons for the association of photographs in series. “It’s true that I work with single images, but they aren’t conceived to appear as such, but rather that the individual image takes its place in the sequence. […] They do provide a narrative structure, but it doesn’t reside in the individual image.”
He also talks about the tonality that characterises his work: “Actually, I consider grey to be a colour” [since Berlin-Wedding in 1976]. It was a conscious decision to push the images in a more extreme way into that immeasurable, diffuse grey area, so that black and white virtually no longer exist. As I see it, grey is the colour of differentiation, as weird as it may sound. Black and white are two fixed points to the left and to the right. And I was thinking that the world doesn’t define itself in a clear way, but presents itself in a host of nuances. And so I tried to introduce this into my photography. […]. Some of my photographs look like sludge, but it was the kind of sludge that was there on November that day.”
There is also the influence of elders, such as Walker Evans, whose American Photographs (1938) Schmidt looked at, and whose 1971 interview with Leslie Katz, in which the term “documentary style” appeared, Schmidt read. Above all, Schmidt exhibited and invited his American contemporaries Lewis Baltz, John Gossage and William Eggleston to the Werkstatt für Photographie. He also had fruitful exchanges with the Austrian photographer Manfred Willmann—and the German playwright and writer Einar Schleef, who signed the text, a literary paving stone, in the middle of Waffenruhe.
After the fall of the Wall, Schmidt conceived EIN-HEIT [UNITY] evoking the reunification of Germany and mixing, in almost equal parts, his own photographs and others, reproducing existing images. Elger likens this fierce statement to Richter’s Atlas, the first volume edition of which appeared in 1989.
Schmidt’s response: “I can see more than one parallel between Richter and myself in my early photographs [...], but not in EINHEIT. In contrast, the way he confronted history and the present had an effect on what I was doing. I bought Atlas as soon as it came out, but although I was fascinated by the book, the photographs seemed more like note-taking, a mechanical recording. As if they were subordinate to something else. Richter is an intellectual, whereas I tend to react emotionally—with my back to the wall.” At MoMA the 163 prints, each measuring 50.5 x 34.3 cm, form a continuous line on the walls of the white cube, a line of sight that the eye travels over in bursts.
With reunification, Berlin gave way to other investigations for the photographer, resulting in the series Frauen [Women] (2000), Irgendwo, Natur [Nature] (2014) and Lebensmittel. In 2008 he said to Antonello Frongia: “My projects are always about renewing my photographic method, which means, I always question my earlier projects to develop a new visual language.” Though his work starts from analysis and moves towards a more personal expression, it is with a singular capacity to modulate strict rigour with emotion. What distinguishes him: the force of the feeling that connects him to what he photographs, his city or nature, humans, architecture, or that ultimate subject: what nourishes us.
CEASEFIRE
To Elger, Schmidt declared: “It started with my taking photographs of the Berlin Wall. Not that I was ever satisfied with the results. But it was a point of entry so that I could get closer to the unconscious aspect in me, and then all of a sudden the pictures started to flow from intuitive ideas I’d had. When this point has been reached in my work, things start to develop a momentum of their own. In general, I need between three and five years for my projects—the first two are taken up with me sorting out what my position is by using this intuitive process. […] Waffenruhe […] was the first time it actually worked out in a plausible way with the artist’s book and the wall presentation.”
It is this project that takes Schmidt’s work into another dimension, which is confirmed by the subsequent major series, EIN-HEIT and Lebensmittel. One might prefer Waffenruhe, of which Baltz wrote in the magazine Camera Austria in 1988, “does not resemble anything that preceded it. […] In his earlier works Schmidt had documented the social artifacts of contemporary Berlin; with Waffenruhe he created an autonomous work, a new cultural artifact standing for itself, something whose existence changes the world it records. If we ask Waffenruhe the same question we asked Schmidt’s earlier works : ‘Does Berlin really look like that?’, the most appropriate answer would be: ‘Yes, it does now.’”
Where does the title come from? We see the grey, then. Its density, brutality, austerity, fragility, vitality, rage, confusion, tension, delicacy, momentum, suspense, a dead body, four faces, so much youth. For Lukas Hoffmann, a Swiss photographer born in 1981 who now lives in Berlin, Waffenruhe is “a visual bomb”. Its impact is intact.
In 1995 Michael Schmidt appeared briefly in Robert Frank’s film The Present. When I saw him the following year, I didn’t recognise the man; I wouldn’t until twenty-five years later. But I have never forgotten the impression he made on me. His character was obvious. His strength can be seen today in his images, in the present.
1 Edited by the Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst mit Archiv Michael Schmidt, Koenig Books-Jeu de Paume, 400 pp., 49.90 euros.