Press Release: Joachim Schmid

Joachim Schmid Photoworks to Feature Mid-Career Retrospective of Artist's Work

As an artist who works in the medium of found photography, Joachim Schmid salvages photos from flea markets and archives, cuts them out of catalogues and publications, retrieves them from city streets, and finds them on the Internet. He then assembles series of photos as artworks that explore the emotional power and recurrent eccentricities of everyday photography.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery will present a mid-career retrospective of the Berlin artist’s found-photography projects, installations, public art works, and publications in a new exhibition, Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982–2007, on view February 3–April 29, 2007. Rarely shown in the United States, Schmid’s work constitutes one of the longest and richest investigations of vernacular photography yet undertaken, according to John Weber, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum and curator of the Schmid exhibition.

Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982-2007 will include selections from Schmid’s most important projects, including Pictures from the Street. A work in progress since 1982, it now encompasses nearly 900 images. The 111 images randomly excerpted for the Tang exhibition include family snapshots, ID photos, and photo-booth discards that Schmid picked up over the past 25 years on walks through cities around the world. Many images are creased, tire-tracked, torn up, walked on, rain-soaked, and/or sun-faded.

For the equally imposing Archiv (1986–1999), Schmid gathered literally thousands of found images—postcards, trading cards, surveillance camera stills, medical photos, magazine shots, real estate brochures, fashion and livestock catalogues, and more—and arranged them by subject on nearly 800 panels. In another series, Arcana (1996), Schmid reprinted found negatives, retaining their unexposed film edges, double exposures, and other anomalies. In the 2004 Cyberspaces, Schmid recorded the temporarily uninhabited sites of Internet prostitutes to compile a melancholy and provocative series of “screengrabs” that highlight in lurid, pixilated colors the tawdry arenas of online sex.

After showing at the Tang, Schmid’s work will travel to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Umea, Sweden. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major monograph published by the Tang, Photoworks of Britain, and Steidl Press.

The public events accompanying the exhibition include an opening reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 3, and a Dunkerley Dialogue between the artist and Michael Ennis-McMillan, an anthropologist and Skidmore’s Dean of Studies, at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 7. Tang director Weber will deliver a lecture titled “Photography and Joachim Schmid: The Accidental Artist,” at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 28, and will conduct two noon curator’s tours of the exhibition, on Friday, Feb. 9, and Wednesday, April 4. All events are free and open to the public.

PDF: Joachim Schmid: Photoworks PR_Joachim_Schmid.pdf