Born in 1955, Balingen, Germany
Lives in Berlin
Biography:
Joachim Schmid studied Visual Communication at Fachhochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hochschule der Künste Berlin from 1976 to 1981. He has exhibited extensively and his work is held in the collections of many major international institutions.
Photoworks commissioned Joachim Schmid as part of its Country Life series, curated by Val Williams in 1998. He produced the work Very Miscellaneous.
Recent solo exhibitions include Photoworks, Fondazione Studio Marangoni, Florence (2009), Printed Matter, Galerie Alain Gutharc, Paris (2008) and Pictures from the Street, Les Rencontres d’Arles (2008). In 2007 he had a major touring retrospective exhibition of his work, Joachim Schmid Photoworks 1982—2007, showing at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and in 2008 at BildMuseet, Umeå in Sweden.
Joachim has published many books. You can see a Bibliography on his website here, or you can visit his flickr page to view books here.
You can explore his incredible archive of found photographs here.
Photoworks published a comprehensive monograph of his work to accompany this retrospective.
More information:
Joachim Schmid began his career in the early 1980s as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original contribution to West German photography. In the pages of Fotokritik and in his regular articles and lectures for other venues, Schmid argued articulately and at times vehemently against prevailing, predominantly conservative notions of 'art photography' and in favour of a broad, encompassing critique of photography as a form of cultural practice.
After ceasing publication of Fotokritik in 1987, Schmid focused on his own art production, based primarily on found photography and public image sources. Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied collection of vernacular photography which formed the raw material for many of the works included in this publication.
Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed and ubiquitous social and aesthetic discourse that runs throughout the public and private spheres of modern life. Yet the fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the sardonic wit he so often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.
Read a Q & A about Joachim's work here.
Listen to an interview with the artist on Lens Culture here.
Find out more about the genre of Found Photography here.
Watch an interview of the artist on Flasher here.
