Michael Schmidt89/90

“In his oeuvre,” writes Chris Dercon, “which reaches back to 1965, the German photographer Michael Schmidt, born in Berlin in 1945, has engaged again and again with the constantly changing urban landscape of his birthplace. With his book ‘Waffenruhe’ (1987), which paid homage to a new lyrical style and employed grey as a decided colour, Schmidt gained international recognition. In ‘Waffenruhe’ Schmidt directs his focus on the emotional conditions of ideological change as they are reflected in the urban spaces of Berlin and in the lives of its inhabitants. ‘I made a few pictures on which nothing but soup can be seen – the same soup that prevailed back then in November,’ Schmidt remarked as early as the late 1970s about some of his Berlin photographs. Was he alluding, without himself suspecting it at that moment, to the later soup of the legendary autumn of 1989? Schmidt does not, however, see himself as a socially critical photographer. He does not want to change the world but offers it resistance, and he regards himself as a realist in the Brechtian sense: ‘Realism is not how real things are, but how things really are.’ […] In ‘89/90’ the Wall appears again. Or rather: we are invited to look at what is to be found at or near the old Wall and has (as yet) not been removed by the new Berlin. Some of Schmidt’s scenes look like photographs of excavations. They are rather brusque dispositifs: individual objects or mere traces capture the viewer’s eye with a rawness or defencelessness, as though they were taking part in an act of protest. But all things remain mute. As in his exhibitions and other books, in ‘89/90′ Schmidt has omitted all direct explanations and identifying captions. In this way Schmidt succeeds in questioning the historical status of the respective monument or document all the more insistently. Indeed, his photographs of Berlin and its fabled Wall stand first and foremost for what Heidegger once described in his essay of the same name as ‘the age of the world picture.’ For Heidegger’s ‘essential thinking,’ a world picture is not a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. It is precisely this distinction that also characterises Schmidt’s approach when he confronts the observer with the process of seeing as such. […] Schmidt’s entire photographic oeuvre conducts one single great investigation into the question of the condition Germany was in, is in and will be in. Michael Schmidt’s pictures are unmistakably ‘pictures of Germany,’ and in this he stands in the same tradition as his colleagues August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Hans-Peter Feldmann, all of them equally exemplary photographers of the German states.”

Exhibition:
Haus der Kunst, Munich, 21/5–22/8/2010