The Berlin-based artist and curator Joachim Schmid is best known for his unique way of seeing photography. In photographic theory, he is well known for several statements that shaken the medium’s field. In artistic practices he appropriates images from various social media channels, magazines, postcards, etc., and reuses them without any given context. The Lithuanian Photographers Association is showcasing his photoseries Bulderbuch (2011-). For the occasion, we present you with an interview with an artist whose thoughts on today’s photography reveal an unexpected philosophical approach and surprisingly deep insights.

 

 

 

You started your career as an art historian for the magazine “Fotokritik” in 1987 and then later decided to become an artist yourself. What drew you towards the art world in the first place?

 

Actually, I started as someone who wanted to become an artist at around the age of 16. I didn’t get the support from my family as I depended on them, so we made a compromise and I studied graphic design, because it’s something you can “make a living” with. But I realized pretty soon that it’s something I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with.

Somehow, I got quite interested in photography and wanted to become a photographer. The longer I worked with the medium, the more doubts I had about what it is and what the alternatives are. I’ve read a lot about it, so I was self-educated in that sense. Eventually, I started writing about photography trying to understand what we’re doing here. That pretty much stopped my practical activities. But the longer I was writing about photography, the more I realized that in the end the pictures are simply stronger than texts and you can never fully cope with the impact of a photographic image.

 

So how did you start to do what you’re doing now?

 

After some time, my attention shifted towards what is happening outside the gallery. Of course, it was a completely different world at the time, and we had a limited number of things we could do in photography galleries. Even though people were still struggling, trying to convince that “Yeah, photography is art!”, I thought photography was so much more than that. The striking power of the medium is that the very same image could mean different things in a different context. So eventually I started using found material and using it for what it is.

 

But some people are still trying to distinguish “art” photography from “commercial” photography, etc., or photography from other art genres.

 

But it all depends on the context. The moment I carry a photograph through the gallery door, it becomes an art piece. What I find is the dominant feature of photography is that it nearly automatically follows up the reality outside. In other words, it’s linked to what is happening in the world. The photograph, like a painting, can create its own world, but it is based on what is happening outside of the camera. That creates a unique relationship between something that is outside of a photograph and what is depicted. That is a quality that I appreciate working with.

If you look at the media shift, let’s say over the past century or so, when photography was invented, we had a new way of depicting the world. If you look at photography’s place nowadays, we don’t look at pictures of the world, we look at a substantial part of the world; these pictures have become a part of our reality like every other artefact.

 

In the Bilderbuch (2012) photo album there was one picture that drew my attention. On a black background was a sentence written from press cutting, “Please do not stop taking pictures”, which sounds rather funny today because as you mentioned this is almost impossible as it’s a huge part of our lives. On the other hand, in the 2017 publication the statement isn’t there anymore.

 

The reason why I picked up this image was because at the very same time for the first press competition an image from Google Street View won the award. I thought, “Wait a minute, this is not how it works, photographers must take pictures, but now they are doing my job!”. It was a little joke I made, and also I think that provoked people to think more, and I like that.

 

While looking at Bilderbuch (2017), I got the instant feeling that you leave so much space. Even the images take up only a little part of the white page. Why did you make this decision?

 

I was creating an ongoing flow of photographs but at the same time they all are distinctive entities. In a way it works like a sentence. So, every picture is a word in a sentence, but you always have a break between the words.

Actually, in the first edition I already knew that there would be a second edition as well, because I wanted to remix the images in the future. In the second edition I mixed all of the images from the previous one and added 20 more pictures. I tried to show that each of them makes a tiny statement and together they mean something bigger, but it is provisional, so that’s why there are white spaces, that’s why each image is on a different page. It’s meant to create a different perspective with the same imagery we encounter every day. Also, I am interested in this type of work because you know, I have been gathering this collection of found photographs for over forty years. And I barely remember where some of them come from and what context they were used in, so it also depends on the viewer’s age. So for example if you’re socially active and you’re 50, you will probably recognise some images that 30-year-old wouldn’t and vice versa. In other words, it offers a different entry voice for everybody and it is never the same for each of us.

 

As you’ve been making this series for a long time now, you most probably collect images in some particular way. What’s your relationship with the archive?

 

There’s a number of aspects to this. When working with found material, you’re dependant on having stuff. So first of all, you have to bring it together, and that creates an archive (or a collection). So, I use only a small percentage of what I own. However, I am not interested in owning these images; I gather these works because I think that the collection itself has a value.

I’m fascinated by printed matter. I don’t know how it all started, but I like when a photograph has been used. If you offered me a photographic print or a very cheap reproduction of a badly printed newspaper, I would probably prefer the latter, because the process of using and reusing stuff gives another layer of meaning. In general, photography is a celebration of printed culture, even though that is now in danger in terms of digitalisation and many probably won’t be used again.

 

What role do museums and other institutions play in terms of archives and collections?

 

Museums are not archives, they are collections. If you look at the history of archives, they are meant to be an institution which collects records that are important for all kinds of legal purposes. Everything that regulates people’s social lives is kept in an archive.

Each collection has an underlining basic idea. A museum’s purpose is to collect the finest examples of artistic production and to preserve them for future generations. I know they exist; I collaborate with some of them and that’s it.

The important thing is that it always reflects how society has changed. Until maybe the 18^th century, collections were dominated either by religious imagery or by the representation of the feudal world, and when that world crumbled there were not that many portraits of Royal families painted anymore. A new part of society entered the canon of what was depicted and also the power structures; so industrial families started collecting art and donating to the museums. And now we have this issue again: there are other ethnic groups, women, people of different sexual orientations, all were excluded. Well, our society has changed again, and so now we include them. And it will change again in the future.

 

Has the viewers’ approach shifted towards your work over time?

 

Absolutely. When I started doing this type of work, there was hardly anybody interested in showing it, because at that time (mid to late 80s) the photography world was very much concerned what proper photographs were. Some people told me it was not even photography. Nowadays, the situation is completely different, nobody questions whether photography is art anymore.

 

Today, photography is considered to be a tool for networking. Would you agree that Bilderbuch provokes the viewer while presenting images without any context?

 

What’s happening is something which I think addresses the crucial point in what you were referring to with social media. Until one generation ago, when we discussed snapshot photography the key concept would have been memory. It was like, “we make photographs for future reference, so we have traces of our personal lives, our families and so on”. This has completely disappeared. Nobody thinks about the future anymore when making photographs and sending them around. They’re only made for the moment and most are never looked at again. They circulate for a moment and then they disappear. And they’re even stored somewhere, nobody is going to look at them again, because everyone has hundreds of thousands of pictures on their hard drives. I think that’s a key moment and of course that changes everyone’s attitudes toward pictures dramatically. Maybe not everybody, but those who participate in the modern world, which excludes probably a half the population, we have to bear that in mind. Our attitude towards time and towards memory has changed dramatically. And that is the reason why I make exhibitions like this: here is something I think is worth stopping for. I want to keep that. Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.