Joachim Schmid was born in 1955 in Balingen; he lives and works in Berlin. His works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including at Lieu d’Art et Action contemporaine de Dunkerque (2015), the Museum Folkwang in Essen (2014). He has published over one hundred artist books. His works can be found in prestigious public collections, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul.

Using other people’s (often mundane) photographs, he creates artwork that is alluring, intriguing, and captivating. He revels in photographs that other people lose or throw away in public, especially if they seem to have been discarded with some animosity or intense feeling. His project ‘Pictures from the Street’ 1982-2012, features countless images of authoress photographs and remnants of images that have been left thrown of discarded, that he has encountered by chance by walking through the streets of public spaces through out the world. The collection has more than 900 images, if he finds an image that has been ripped or towrn apart he will try his best to reassemble the image and then disply the imag on arhival paper.Displaying the images inchronological order noting the date and place where each image was  found.

A project that has become one of Schmid most notable works is that he created an ‘institute’ that offered to safely recycle or re-use dangerous film and photos. The Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs became publicized worldwide, by chance, and Schmid was inundated with parcels of photos and negatives that people wanted to dispose of, safely. One of the parcels that was sent to the ‘institute’ was a parcel of over a decade of negative images from a professional photo studio, how ever the original company that sent the parcel had sliced the images in half to try and destroy their value, but what Schmidt discovered that he was able to put two half’s of separate images together to create weird and bizarre compositions.

Joachim Schmid created this image after he sent out a request to be sent images that people wanted to be disposed of in a safe and confidential manner, from a photograph company he received  a box  in which all of the images had been sliced in half to try and destroy the value of  the images. What Joachim did was found that he was able to combine two separate images to make an entirely different image. On first glance of this image, it looks like the young girl on the left hand side is an archival images of the grown woman of the left, so that the photograph has decades between them. The only detail that we can see of the woman face is the eyes which can be seen to have a wrinkles beginning to appear .The image looks as if it was taken in a very professional environment, such as a photograph studio, it looks as if artificial lighting was used to take both images.