Joachim Schmid
Photoworks 1982-2007

In 1989 Joachim Schmid coined the motto “No new photographs until the old ones have been used up!” This exhibition marks the first retrospective of Schmid’s work, and indeed, in twenty-five years he has rarely shown images that he made himself. Instead, Schmid assembles related groups of found photos to reveal patterns of use and meaning that point to the social rituals, human desires, domestic events, and economic conditions that people employ photography to commemorate and display. He productively blurs the roles of artist, historian, critic, archeologist, and anthropologist to create a varied and moving exploration of everyday photography. As Spanish photographer and critic Joan Fontcuberta has written, Schmid’s work “has its origins in the idea that excess, waste and rubbish are paradigmatic effects of late capitalism. His projects espouse a kind of photographic ecology, but they are also concerned with the values of the creative experience itself: accumulation, chance, authorship, quality and originality.”

Joachim Schmid began his career in the early 1980s in West Berlin as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original journal of West German photography. Since 1987, he has focused on his own art. Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied trove of family albums and snapshots, providing the raw material for many of the series included in this exhibition.