Joachim Schmid is a Berlin-based conceptual artists who collects and re-uses photographs that other people throw away. He uses these discarded, ripped and mundane images as a way to create artwork that is alluring, intriguing and captivating. He says that he has a passion for ‘visual trash’. He enjoys using other peoples photos that they throw away in public especially if it to be seen to be done with animosity and intense feeling.
“People are doing it everywhere in the world now!”
Schmid is very much a modern-day anthropologist who tries to understand contempered cultures by studying its visual rubbish. One of the projects he started was Pictures from the Street, (Bilder von der Straße, in German). This was in the early 1980s and it still is continued today. For this project he keeps and classifies each photograph or fragment of a photograph he finds in a public space, the collection now has more than 900 images. If one of the images Schmid finds has been ripped to pieces, he will re-assemble what he can so that he can be re-photographed. Schmid notes the date and place here each photo was found, this helps with imaging the stories behind the images. By looking at this collection it is impossible not to think of the back story, about who once owned these photographs, who’s in the photos and why they were thrown away.
“For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making – globally!” – Joachim Schmid
Another project that Schmid created came out of a prank which he started by posting what looked like a serous notice in a public newspaper about the ecological dangers of unwanted photographs and negatives. He went on to create an “institute” that offered to safely recycle or re-use dangerous film and photos. This “institute” became publicised worldwide and Schmid was bombarded with parcels of photos and negatives that people wanted to dispose of.
In one of these parcels, he discovered decades worth of medium format negatives from a professional photo studio. But they were all sliced in half in an effort to destroy their value. Schmid found that he could put together the left half of a negative with the right half of another negative to come up with a bizarre composition that was uniformly lit and fit together. It was also helpful that the photo studio always positioned its lights in the same way for years and never moved the camera closer or further way from the model.
Image analysis
This image is a mix of two halves of different negatives to create one final piece, I like how this manipulation of a photo allows for there to be many different elements in one smile photograph. This image consists of one side of the negative being a women in black and white with glasses with a wide smile compared to the other half which is presented as an older man in a smart suit with a closed lipped smile. I like how different each side of the image is but also how they seem to fit together and create a good composition making it pleasing to the viewer. Another element of the final piece which I find intriguing is how the left side of the photo is bigger then the right, this makes me think that Schmid wanted the women and her facial features to be more present in the photograph compared to the mans features.