Joachim Schmid
Bilder von der Straße (series 41-141-241-341-441-541-641-741-841-941) is a project that references a constellation of found photographs that were left abandoned on pavements of various locations. Spanning thirty years from 1982 to 2012, the work probes the desire to destroy and desecrate lived moments and memories.
Security Check, 1985–1987 consists of photographs taken by the artist as he passed through airport security checks, gestures and impressionistic partial views are caught on his camera. The body is in transit, performing a specific task characterised by a set of gestures indicative and specific to our modernity.
Dallas, Texas, Dealey Plaza. The site where John F. Kennedy was assassinated is a major tourist magnet. X Marks the Spot, 2013 consists of images showing the memorial in action, as people stop to have their photograph taken. White Xs on the pavement mark the site where the president was fatally shot—in the middle of a freeway on-ramp. For personal documentation, visitors often wait for a pause in traffic, hurrying to one of the crosses and have their photograph taken, leaving the road before the next stream of traffic. A webcam is positioned in a window on the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository, the site where, on November 22, 1963, an assassin allegedly fired the shots that killed Kennedy as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza. The camera’s perspective matches exactly that of the assassin: it now photographs the tourists documenting their own memorial photos, the viewer witnessing this in real time. The work shows events that unfold when people presume they are unobserved. The doubling of the lens, a frame within a frame, reveals qualities of the space of collective memory and how our relationship and responses to historical acts is constantly in formation, asking: what is a monument, and what can its function be?
O Campo, 2010, depicts Brazilian football fields in cities. As the images are taken via satellite, the lack of uniformity and the ad-hoc nature of these fields are revealed. The Brazilian desire for football is well-documented and these fields herald the socio-political context of the game in Brazil. According to FIFA’s laws of the game, these pitches would fail their regulatory framework. The work speaks to these contradictions, between reality and expectation, the micro and macro.
EXHIBITIONS AT HOLLYBUSH GARDENS
TEXTS
Interview with Joachim Schmid
Interview by Mauro Zanchi, Antinomie, 16 February 2021
Joachim Schmid: Photoworks | Gallery P420, Bologna
Review by Mauro Zanchi, ATP Diary, 11 February 2021
Interview with Joachim Schmid
Interview by Sara Benaglia and Mauro Zanchi, ATP Diary, 22 July 2020
Le jeu avec la condition figurative
Essay by Pascale Krief, Artpress, No. 25, November 2019
Orphans In the Storm
Interview by Stephen Shore, Elephant, No. 21, Winter 2015
Un explorateur en photographie
Feature by Valentine Plisnier, Camera, No. 8, Winter 2015
Observing by Watching: Joachim Schmid and the Art of Exchange
Feature by Geoffrey Batchen, Aperture, No. 210, Spring 2013
El arribo del arte contemporáneo a la fotografía
Feature by Natalia de León, Revista DOSSIER, No. 33, July-August 2012
Hunter and Gatherer
Interview with Joachim Schmid, Album, Magazin für Fotografie, No. 2: Same/Same, Winter 2011
«Tausend Himmel» et principe d’équivalence • “Tausend Himmel” and the Equivalence Principle
Essay by Joël Vacheron, Volume, No. 1, June 2010
The Accidental Predator
Profile by Sarah Andress, Art on Paper, Vol. 12, No. 2, November 2007
I Am Not a Photographer
Essay by Simone Menegoi, Mousse, No. 10, September 2007
Photography, Anonymity and the Archive: Joachim Schmid
Essay by Mark Durden, Parachute, No. 109, 2003
BIOGRAPHY
Joachim Schmid (b. 1955, Balingen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Since the 1980s, Schmid’s image-based practice has focused on the recycling of vernacular photography, while in recent decades he has directed attention to the Internet and the frantic proliferation of images characterising our contemporary visual economy. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at Lieu d’Art et Action contemporaine de Dunkerque (2015), the Museum Folkwang in Essen (2014), the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2014), the Gagosian Gallery in New York (2013), the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (2012), the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello-Balsamo/Milan (2012), the Cleveland Museum of Art (2012), the Centre de la photographie Genève (2010), Les Rencontres d’Arles (2008), and The Photographers’ Gallery in London (2007). He has published over one hundred artist books. His works can be found in public collections internationally, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.