Last summer I wrote about an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in London on the “immersive aesthetics” of Joachim Schmid. Basically Schmid roamed the streets collecting old discarded photographs and then, armed with the necessary expertise in modern artworld terminology, displayed the results to a grateful public:
The dedicated use of found photographs has nothing to do with turning them into art. Schmid does not attempt to attain a level of meaning or to describe the collapse of communication, so often heralded as a consequence of the exponential increase of imagery. On the contrary, we could see his work to be about the rediscovery of meaning. Underneath that pre-determined image repertoire of the amateur photograph, which assures that repeated stereotypes and cliches are produced again and again, other narratives are uncovered – life stories we don’t and will never know, but whose existence we can intuit in Schmid’s work. Returning from the dead, as it were, that diffuse and undifferentiated mass of photographs begins to talk, to speak, to assert its stories.
The act of making photographs is equated with other aspects of human communication – talking, writing, speaking, making love, embracing, crying, photographing. The photograph never existed simply to record or doument a given piece of reality. Its singular and infinitely repeated mission is to reach out, reach out for human contact in the face of the banal finality of death.
The exhibition drowned under the weight of its own verbiage, as so many do. But in a way you can see what he was trying to achieve – if, that is, the whole enterprise hadn’t been so embedded in a self-regarding gallery culture, and Schmid hadn’t been so concerned to impose himself everywhere. Something, for instance, like this. Random old photographs – unexplained, mysterious, evocative.
Here’s just one.
I think it likely that a number of the images are from this book.
Mick Hartley 
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