Schmidt arrived at a strategy of disseminating
his work early on. He photographs large quantities
of images without a specific project in mind. These
images are then organized into groups with socially
evocative titles, such as Ausla ̈ndische Mitbu ̈rger
(Foreign Co-citizens, 1973) orBerlin, Stadtbilder
(Berlin, Images of the City, 1976–80). He exhibits
the work in clusters or groupings intended to draw
relationships among the images, often in a public
context, and then, circumstances permitting, pub-
lishes a book of the images. Unlike many artist
monographs, Schmidt’s books are not intended to
catalogue discrete images but rather to intercon-
nect images dependent on those associations, mir-
roring his process of hanging photographs on the
wall. The books tend to be light on text—often
having none other than the title—and are truly
more artists’ books than monograph, despite mass
production by major publishers.
The project that garnered Schmidt his first acco-
lades wasBerlin-Kruezberg(1973), funded and pub-
lished by the Mayor of Kruezberg as a variation on
the annual report. He photographed this project in
his early career signature style, combining docu-
mentary instinct, humanitarian impulse, and politi-
cal critique. In 1976, he co-founded the Werkstatt
fu ̈r Photographie in the Volkshochschule Kreuz-
berg, overlooking Checkpoint Charlie, a crossing
gate in the Berlin Wall. The school greatly influ-
enced photography in Berlin, serving as a primary
place of exchange between a generation of Berlin
photographers and their European and American
contemporaries. Schmidt served as director of the
Werkstatt from 1976 to 1978, and he continued to
teach and participate in various academic settings.
Famous pupils include Andreas Gursky, whom he
taught at the Gesamthochschule in Essen. Schmidt
was pivotal in bringing many American photogra-
phers working in the documentary tradition to Ger-
many, such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and
William Eggleston. His friendship with Baltz re-
mained so strong that Baltz reproduced a letter
from Schmidt to him in Baltz’s 1990 bookRule
Without Exception.
Schmidt gained new attention in the international
photography community with his projectWaffen-
ruhe(Ceasefire). This project brought Schmidt his
first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), New York, in 1988, and it continued to
be shown internationally through the late 1980s and
early 1990s.Waffenruhemarked a new style for
Schmidt, with closer cropping and other more evi-
dently subjective aesthetic decisions. For the first
time, he included photographs of the actual Berlin
Wall, a metaphorical subject alluded to in many of
his earlier photographs of the city’s neighborhoods.
AfterWaffenruhe, Schmidt began to experiment
more freely with different styles of photographing.
Subsequent projects include Selbst (Self, 1985–
1989), a relentless series of self-portraits that feature
Schmidt’s fragmented body parts. Throughout the
1980s and 1990s, he continued to manifest the
experimental spirit evident in his early attempts to
use conventional photographic materials in new
ways—black-and- white film, silver gelatin prints,
photographic books—by subtly reinventing his
work in each subsequent project.
Schmidt continued to explore a landscape and a
city fraught with history in his pivotal workEin-heit
(U-ni-ty, 1991–1994), shown at MoMA in 1996
and published in the same year. The importance of
fragmentation as an interpretive trope is reinforced
by Schmidt’s dividing with hyphens a word mean-
ing wholeness, diametric forces embodied in the
very title of the project. Conventional aesthetics of
black-and-white photography were abandoned in
favor of intentionally inconsistent prints, often
with compressed, almost monochromatic tonal
ranges, large grain, and poor detail, all of which
served to reinforce his subjects. The book presents
a startling record of Schmidt’s fascinations with the
weight of history upon the German citizen, the
cultural lineage behind his project, the interrelated-
ness of past and present, and the impossibility of
truly knowing, especially through photography. A
project of epic scope, Schmidt included portrait and
landscape photographs that he made in Berlin,
photographs of objects of significance to the Ger-
man populace, and re-photographed images reso-
nant in collective German memory. By combining
portraiture of ordinary citizens with landscapes
changed through history and historical material,
Schmidt points to the effects of the latter two on
the subjects in the portraits. Examples of re-photo-
graphed materials include stills from Leni Reifen-
stahl’s 1934 Nazi propaganda filmTriumph of the
Will, photographs of soldiers of the German Demo-
cratic Republic passing a review, and a tablet in-
scribed with the third stanza of the German national
anthem, the lyrics of which were used under the Wei-
mar Republic and the Federal Republic. Images are
doubled on facing pages, cropped tightly to frag-
ment the scene, printed backwards, and otherwise
freely manipulated.
Dense with precise historical references but also
elusively vague at points, and lacking a declarative
personal style, Schmidt’s work has not achieved
the international market success of many of his bet-
ter-known German contemporaries. Nonetheless,
Schmidt continues to live and work in Berlin, weavingSCHMIDT, MICHAEL