Background
Michael Schmidt was born on October 6, 1945, in Berlin, Germany. In 1950, the family moved to Erkner, the German Democratic Republic, close to Berlin-E. In 1955, they escaped to Berlin-W.
2010
Michael Schmidt, photographer, author, and educator.
Michael Schmidt, photographer, author, and educator.
Sonnenstraße 96, 44139 Dortmund, Germany
Michael Schmidt passed an external examination as a graduate photo-designer at Fachhochschule Dortmund (Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts), in 1980.
Michael Schmidt, photographer, author, and educator.
Michael Schmidt was a member of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie.
(Berlin-Wedding collects Michael Schmidt's documentary-sty...)
Berlin-Wedding collects Michael Schmidt's documentary-style images of Berlin's Wedding district.
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Schmidt-Berlin-Wedding-Thomas-Weski/dp/3960986440/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Schmidt+Photographien&qid=1596704930&s=books&sr=1-3
1978
(The book is Michael Schmidt's portrait of a still-divided...)
The book is Michael Schmidt's portrait of a still-divided Berlin: it brings together surprising combinations of high-contrast, black-and-white images to express a generation's dystopian sense of life shortly before the fall of the Wall. Schmidt evokes a world of ruptures and absences that eschews any comprehensive perspective. The images combine with a text by author and director Einar Schleef to create a brusque, entirely individual vision of the fragility of human existence - a book that is regularly included among the most influential photographic books of the 20th century.
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Schmidt-Waffenruhe-Janos-Frecot/dp/3960983026/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Schmidt+Photographien&qid=1596704930&s=books&sr=1-4
1987
(In this artist's book, Michael Schmidt traces the univers...)
In this artist's book, Michael Schmidt traces the universal iconography of political systems and the images of humankind they project. Addressing the complex relationships between the individual and the state, he asks how we can resist the loss of individuality inherent in systems of mass control.
https://www.amazon.com/U-Ni-Ty-Michael-Schmidt/dp/1881616649/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Schmidt+Photographien&qid=1596704930&s=books&sr=1-10
1996
(Michael Schmidt's brand new series Frauen was especially ...)
Michael Schmidt's brand new series Frauen was especially conceived for the EXPO 2000 in Hanover and portrays young women in their twenties who are still in the process of developing the characteristic features of a discrete individual identity.
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Schmidt-Frauen/dp/3883754234/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Schmidt+Photographien&qid=1596704930&s=books&sr=1-7
2000
(Michael Schmidt's photographs have always focused on his ...)
Michael Schmidt's photographs have always focused on his hometown of Berlin especially in book format - a fundamental element of his work. One of his most important bodies of work about Berlin, Berlin Nach 1945, has never before been published as a whole. It is particularly significant at this time, given the extreme urban, social, artistic, and general developmental changes Berlin has undergone in recent years. This series documents a place which, as recently as 1980, was still very much marred by World War II, and provides an impressive visual record of a city in a state of flux.
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Schmidt-Berlin-Nach-1945/dp/3865210902/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Schmidt+Photographien&qid=1596704930&s=books&sr=1-2
2005
Michael Schmidt was born on October 6, 1945, in Berlin, Germany. In 1950, the family moved to Erkner, the German Democratic Republic, close to Berlin-E. In 1955, they escaped to Berlin-W.
In 1961-1962, Michael Schmidt had started an apprenticeship as a house painter, which he didn't complete. Trained as a policeman, he taught himself photography and began taking photographs in 1965. He passed an external examination as a graduate photo-designer at Fachhochschule Dortmund (Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts), in 1980.
At his family's urging, Michal Schmidt took a job as a police officer to ensure a steady living, but he abandoned that work to follow his early passion for photography. When he was twenty years old, with no training in the medium, he started using a miniature camera. Five years later, in 1969, he was teaching a course in photography at the Volkhochschule in Berlin-Kreuzberg, and he eventually organized photography seminars and workshops. In 1970, he conducted and taught seminars on photography at adult education centers in Berlin-Kreuzberg and Berlin-Neukölln. In 1973, Schmidt left the police force. Schmidt went on to publish books of photography and exhibit his work throughout Europe and the United States. What characterizes his books is the power of evocation that his photographs carry with them, by offering insights on historical or social realities. However, he challenged the viewers to dive into their individual emotions in relation to the themes presented and to dig through the layers hiding behind his subjects.
In 1973, his first book, Berlin-Kreuzberg, was published and an exhibit of the same name was held in the Berlin Museum. The focus of the project is Berlin: its streets and houses and its residents. Between 1976 and 1980, he documented the architecture of Berlin with its austere residential buildings and offices, culminating in the series Berlin Stadtbilder. The value of Schmidt's work does not only rely on its importance as documents but also on the social realities that echo and resonate in capturing Berliners at particular socio-historical moments.
His most famous collection of photographs, Ein-Heit (U-Ni-Ty), is a study of the Berlin of the 1990s, reunited after the fall of the wall in 1989. Despite its re-unification however, the city of Schmidt's photographs is about as fragmented as the collection's hyphenated title suggests, and the uncanny juxtapositions of his own photographs with historical images taken during the Nazi era gives a haunting sense of the past from which Schmidt's Berlin was still struggling to escape. Ein-Heit was made in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of East and West Germany. It comprises 163 images: some were taken by Schmidt in a factual, descriptive style, and others he re-photographed from newspapers, propaganda journals, history books, and other communication and mass media sources. In an effort to articulate the difficulties of constructing images of historical memory in Germany, he combined contemporary and archival pictures of mass demonstrations, historic sites, emblems, monuments, and both anonymous and notorious people into a poignant study of German society in the aftermath of World War II. Drawing on the rich traditions of picture archives and the photo-essay, Schmidt presented history not as a progressive sequence of events but as a decentered, simultaneous narration. He prompted viewers to consider the limits of historical representation, leaving it up to them to determine whether a given image was taken in East or West Germany, prior to or after World War II, or during division or since reunification.
To complement his work as a photographer, in 1976 Schmidt opened up the Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography). He invited a number of American photographers to teach there, among them William Eggleston and John Gossage, and his heading up of this institution established him as one of the pre-eminent names in German photography. He served as its director from 1976 to 1978 and continued to teach there afterward, influencing younger German photographers, among them Andreas Gursky. In 1976, he co-founded the Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography) at the Volkhoschschule (Adult Education Center), a school that played a critical role in Berlin becoming a transatlantic forum of exchange between European and American photographers. In 1981, he terminated his activity at the Werkstatt für Photographie.
In 1979-1980, Michal Schmidt taught at the University of Duisburg-Essen; in 1985-1988 - at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Berlin. In 1988-1992, he was a Visiting Professor for Photography as Art at Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst (International Summer Academy of Fine Arts) in Salzburg, Austria.
Right up until his last collection, Lebensmittel (Groceries; 2012), Schmidt had never used color photography in his work - in 2009 a major retrospective of his work, held at the Haus der Kunst, was fittingly titled Grey as Colour. His photographs are remarkable for their near-complete absence of chiaroscuro - their color schemes always seem to float in between the two extremes of black and white, caught in the grey and ambivalent middle, just like Berlin was caught between the political poles of East and West. In his last work, the series Lebensmitte, Michael Schmidt investigated the way people feed themselves by exploring the processes behind the European food systems from farms to people's homes.
Michael Schmidt worked within the frame of a series or book, in which each photograph carries its own meaning and existence but it gains an added, broader meaning when put together with other images as if to create a photographic language, completely free from accompanying written texts. Schmidt's approach was investigatory and documentary; he spent seven years researching and shooting farms, factories, farm animals, packaging, and food. He carefully drafted and planned his projects, but despite this meticulous planning, the outcome and completion are still unknown and therefore could fail, an aspect that the artist came to accept as an intrinsic element of the creative process. It is perhaps because of this acceptance of making mistakes that each of his series is quite distinct from the others and finds its own unique communicative figurative language. For each series, he looked for a new angle, a further way to represent and capture his topics, making it hard to typecast his work, an aspect that might explain why his works have not reached as wide an audience as they deserved. Schmidt let his subjects resonate and speak for themselves by applying both a realistic and an impeccable pictorial style which documents social and environmental themes. His artwork mirrored the aesthetic of both disciplines together. Although at first glance his pieces may appear bleak and desolated, mainly due to his predilection for grey monochromatic photos, he was not judging or accusing but simply revealing what he explores. By rejecting the photographic concept of the "decisive moment," his style avoids superficiality, favoring a "straight" approach to the subject at hand; the colors of the world are intentionally removed and replaced by a broad range of grays.
(Michael Schmidt's brand new series Frauen was especially ...)
2000(The book is Michael Schmidt's portrait of a still-divided...)
1987(Michael Schmidt's photographs have always focused on his ...)
2005(In this artist's book, Michael Schmidt traces the univers...)
1996(Berlin-Wedding collects Michael Schmidt's documentary-sty...)
1978Michael Schmidt expressed his goal in arranging pictures as "1 + 1 = 3," a coinage illustrating his belief that juxtaposing a series of photographs greatly increases their emotional power.
Quotations:
"…I always stroll straight into a cul-de-sac and can't find a way out. Then I come to terms with this as a sort of condition and at some point, later on, I'm back on the outside again. That is to say, failure or making mistakes is an integral part of my way of working."
"Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you."
"Grey is my color. There are thousands of grey gradations. Black and white are always the darkest and the lightest grey. "
Michael Schmidt once described himself as a "blind-alley photographer," likening his creative approach to walking into a cul-de-sac and scrambling to find a way back out. Through his career, Schmidt placed himself as an influential artist within the photography world due to his atypical way of developing projects, his documentary approach, and his anachronistic decision to distance himself from the "decisive moment" and instead create a visual language flowing from a collection of photos.
Quotes from others about the person
The French photographer Luc Delahaye said of Schmidt's work: "His language is a language of precision and his tool is the most simple one: a small, 35mm camera, and a few rolls of films. His pictures look simple at first glance, and their anti-sentimentality, their refusal of all the tricks of the usual seduction, their concision, and their clarity, give them great efficiency. They show what they show but they manage to retain an opacity, a mystery, and they become a support for our imagination."
Michael Schmidt married Angelika Miersch in 1968. She gave birth to his daughter Olivia in 1971. They divorced in 1974. He married Karin Kopto in 1982.