Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982-2007

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2007 by Elisabeth Tonnard

Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982-2007, edited by Gordon MacDonald and John S Weber. Photoworks/Steidl/Tang Museum/288pp./$55.00 (hb).

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This heavy, beautifully produced book situates itself as a blend of exhibition catalog and illustrated critical monograph. It gives generous samples from Joachim Schmid's major series with informative essays situating the work of this archival artist. The medley is further established when we find that this has been a collaborative, international project involving Photoworks, the Tang Museum, Nederlands Fotomuseum, BildMuseet, and The Photographers' Gallery, as the publication coincided with the traveling exhibition 'Joachim Schmid: Photoworks 1982-2007," organized by the Tang Museum. This mix of different backgrounds is appropriate to Schmid's own work, which remixes vernacular imagery from all over the world found in archives, on city streets, or sent directly to the artist. In fact, he claims that few people in the world have looked at more photographs than he has. One of his many remarkable series shows big compositions of horizontal lines he calls "statics," consisting of shredded mass-produced imagery such as postcards of sunsets, the shreds of which are carefully pasted together into new compositions. This can be seen as the most abstract of the series presented in the book, though by calling it "statics" Schmid also pulls the work partly back into a pictorial tradition while drawing attention to the nature of perception in our visual culture. Given the vast amount of destruction going on here, it is surprising to see that there are other series where the level is even higher. "Arcana" is a suggestive series of prints from found, damaged black-and-white negatives--including the negative's edges. Auto-destruction seems to be a creative force here, the negative itself a living force precisely in its decay. The people present in these photos appear as if behind a veil, and seem as if in discussion with the destruction around them. This sense of unstoppable loss is omnipresent in Schmid's work, bringing attention to what was already on its way out of the world: thrown-away images captured before the nothingness would overcome them, and recombined into new presences that will one day fade away as well.

ELISABETH TONNARD is a graduate student at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.