Artist Talk: Joachim Schmid

This event is free for students with ID and Aperture Members at the $50 level and above.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, is pleased to present a talk with artist Joachim Schmid. For decades Schmid has appropriated thousands of photographs, discovering new meanings in the currents of digital photography. For series such as Archiv (1986–99) and Estrelas amadas (2013), Schmid sourced imagery from the public sphere, using flea markets and Flickr as tools to understand trends in contemporary photography, including our fascination with constantly redocumenting the same occurrences in the same way. Schmid’s collection highlights the rapid image economy that is characteristic of the digital age, providing a real-time glimpse of culture at large. Writing in Aperture magazine on Schmid’s extended book project, Other People’s Photographs (2008–11), Geoffrey Batchen observed: “Here, then, is the challenge his project lays before us—not just to make sense of contemporary photography, but to find ways to creatively intervene within it; not just to wonder at its numbing sameness, but also to exacerbate into visibility the abrasive political economy of difference.”

Joachim Schmid (born in Balingen, Germany, 1955) studied Visual Communication at Fachhochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hochschule der Künste Berlin, and began his career as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Galerie Alain Gutharc, Paris; Museo Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan; Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago;  National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, Bradford, United Kingdom; and The Frances Young Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York. Schmid’s work is included in the collections of Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  Schmid has published many titles, including Sixty Minutes on the Sunset Strip (2014) and X Marks the Spot (2013). Schmid currently lives and works in Berlin.

Image: Photogenetic Drafts #8, 1991

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and Members of Aperture Foundation.