Michael Schmidt

A Former Police Officer and Postwar Berlin

Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945, five months after Germany’s surrender. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961, when he was sixteen, so the city’s division coincided with his own adolescence.^*1 While working as a police officer, Schmidt taught himself photography and began documenting neighborhoods in West Berlin in the late 1960s.^*3 Early projects such as Berlin-Wedding and Berlin nach 45 depict buildings, vacant lots, walls, alleys, and people in a restrained register. Schmidt repeatedly examined how reconstruction and division remained inscribed on everyday surfaces, leaving iconic motifs such as the Wall or historic architecture in a secondary role.^*19 In Berlin-Wedding, repeated photographs of housing, intersections, factories, and vacant lots make urban planning and social class legible through subtle differences in ordinary scenery. The approach keeps its distance from visual languages that turn postwar reconstruction or the Wall into dramatic protagonists.^*3 The pictures share the cool restraint associated with New Topographics, yet their subject is the Berlin in which Schmidt himself lived. Repeated views of housing and vacant lots established an early method for reading urban planning and class difference on the surface of daily life. ^*5

As Schmidt repeated these views, the limits of any total picture of the city became increasingly apparent in the photographs. MoMA’s 1988 New Photography 4 likewise identified Schmidt’s refusal to pretend to complete understanding of a place as a defining quality of the work.^*27 His Berlin never summarizes the city like a map; instead, it records the limits of understanding that remain even after photographing familiar places again and again. Those limits become a more deliberate formal principle in Waffenruhe. After leaving the police force, Schmidt rephotographed the Berlin he had once patrolled as fragments of neighborhoods, walls, vacant lots, and housing.^*1 The tension between having worked on the side of public order and seeing the city as an accumulation of fragments became one starting point for his photography.

Werkstatt für Photographie: An Alternative Network in West Berlin

In 1976, Schmidt founded the Werkstatt für Photographie at an adult education institution in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Beyond technical instruction, he incorporated peer critique, exhibitions, and visiting lecturers, creating a place where contemporary photography could be studied through original prints and books.^*10 Among the photographers introduced there early were Lewis Baltz, Larry Clark, and William Eggleston. American photography rooted in personal experience, private life, and the color of the everyday became material for discussion.^*12 By making exhibitions part of the educational process, the Werkstatt brought students into direct contact with original prints and photobooks that were otherwise difficult to see in Germany, turning the classroom into a site where different ideas of photography could meet and conflict.^*11 Schmidt aimed to create an environment in which methods could be tested against one another, and the Werkstatt opened a route through postwar German photography distinct from schools organized around the inheritance of a single aesthetic.

The range of photographic positions at the Werkstatt also shaped Schmidt’s own work. His early urban projects centered on cool observation of the same neighborhoods, but by the 1980s he had grown increasingly skeptical of the very idea of an “objective image of the city.”^*9 Testing different photographic approaches at the Werkstatt fed into his later habit of rebuilding the rules of distance, tonality, and subject matter for each new series.^*12 Because the photographers associated with the Werkstatt later followed very different paths, its reassessment complicates any account of postwar German photography organized around a single school or aesthetic.^*12 Through the Werkstatt, postwar German photography developed another network alongside the Bechers’ lineage—one that debated methods in active dialogue with American photography.

The Gray of Waffenruhe and “1 + 1 = 3”

Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) was photographed in West Berlin from 1985 to 1987. Fragments of walls, young people, vacant lots, trees, windows, and newspapers sit beside one another in coarse grain and dark gray tones.^*23 Schmidt called gray the “color” his photographs required, avoiding smooth black-and-white gradation and compressing the image into dense middle tones.^*9 As a result, figures and backgrounds, walls and sky, windows and reflections sink into the same uncertain tonal range, preventing subjects from becoming instantly legible information. In one photograph held by MoMA, only the dirty glass surface is in focus while the street beyond blurs, forcing the attempt to look at Berlin to confront an obstructing surface first.^*23 The dirty window condenses the opacity of the series, turning the photograph into a surface where history, personal memory, and the materiality of the medium overlap.^*24 By making the viewer spend time determining what is in the picture, Schmidt uses gray to keep the divided city from settling into easily readable evidence. ^*25

In the photobook, this opacity extends to the sequence. Waffenruhe, made between 1985 and 1987, resists being absorbed into a retrospective narrative of the years immediately before the Wall fell and preserves the claustrophobia of everyday life at the time.^*17 The images are filled with a sense of enclosure embedded in daily life, resisting histories tidied up by hindsight. Schmidt described his approach to photobook editing as “1 + 1 = 3”: two adjacent photographs produce a third meaning that neither contains alone.^*20 In Waffenruhe, people and walls, trees and buildings, newspapers and vacant lots are juxtaposed without explaining one another. Page order becomes a structure through which the viewer physically experiences tension among fragments.^*31 By producing a third meaning from adjacent images, editing turns the photobook from a container for individual photographs into a site where meaning is generated. History emerges through the comparison of fragments that may contradict one another, making that comparison itself the documentary task. At the center of the book, seventeen pages of text by Einar Schleef interrupt the photographic sequence.^*17 The extended text pulls the reader out of the visual flow. Just as the photographs begin to seem sufficient for understanding Berlin, the reader is displaced into another linguistic system and then sent back to the images.^*32 The seventeen pages function as another language that breaks the photographic flow rather than as an explanation of the political situation, allowing neither text nor image to stand for the whole. In setting incomplete forms of testimony against one another, the text, the gray tonality, and “1 + 1 = 3” all participate in the same editorial principle.

The interruption created by Schleef’s text also extends into exhibitions, where changing the spacing and order of photographs allows the relationships—and therefore the meanings—of the same prints to shift.^*21 Schmidt treated relationships among images as the basic unit of the work, shifting emphasis away from the individual print and linking documentary photography to exhibition design. Schleef’s long text changes the pace of reading and shifts a gaze that has moved through photographs into another language. The collision between photograph and text is built into the structure of the book itself.^*32 The break between photograph and text becomes part of the reading experience, producing a structure distinct from the photo essay’s usual assumption that words and pictures will supplement one another.

Ein-heit: Colliding Historical Material with His Own Photographs

Made in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, Ein-heit (U-NI-TY) consists of 163 photographs. Schmidt juxtaposed his own pictures of streets and people with rephotographed images from newspapers, magazines, propaganda publications, and history books, all at the same scale.^*22 Ein-heit structures the period from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 through postwar division and reunification as a collision of fragments.^*22 Politicians, crowds, monuments, anonymous people, interiors, and vacant lots appear with their sources left uncertain, requiring viewers to sort out East and West, historical periods, perpetrators and victims for themselves. The decision to give his own photographs and images already circulating through society the same scale is crucial. Placing the photographer’s original pictures alongside anonymous media imagery asks whether personal memory can ever exist independently of images produced by the nation.^*29 The title itself splits the German word EIN-HEIT in two, distancing the work from any celebration of unity as a completed state.^*6 Both book and exhibition are designed as spaces where the sources of memory intermingle and viewers must revise their judgments repeatedly. By removing any hierarchy between pictures he made and images already circulating publicly, Schmidt made the overlap between personal memory and national imagery part of the work. In Ein-heit, historical meaning emerges from the photographer’s images together with newspapers, propaganda, and later acts of recontextualization. ^*4

The total of 163 photographs occupies a deliberate middle ground between an exhaustive archive and a selection of masterpieces. The quantity produces a pace of repetition and difference that belongs to neither complete cataloging nor a highlights edit.^*22 Viewers repeatedly encounter similar faces, crowds, and signs, reading them differently each time their surrounding images change. The work makes the editing of memory more central than the act of simply “remembering” history. Rephotographing preexisting images also strips away their original newspaper or magazine context. Once source information disappears, the pictures lose some of their former political clarity and force viewers to rely on their own knowledge and assumptions.^*29 Images separated from their sources reveal how the meaning of documentary material depends on where it is published and what surrounds it.

Rebuilding Method in Frauen and Lebensmittel

In Frauen (1997–99), Schmidt kept the framing conditions consistent while allowing differences in posture, clothing, gaze, and self-presentation to remain. A later Berlin Biennale presentation foregrounded questions of women’s self-image, moving the series away from readings that reduce its subjects to sociological specimens.^*14 As in the shift from his early street photography to Waffenruhe, Frauen rebuilt the visual register around its subject, establishing a new distance and tonal scale for photographing people. An exhibition at Villa Schöningen treated Frauen as a turning point in which Schmidt recalibrated his distance from streets and historical material toward the human figure.^*15

In the late Lebensmittel, Schmidt followed fields, factories, meat, packaging, distribution, and retail displays, accumulating fragments of the processes through which natural materials become commodities.^*7 Lebensmittel moves decisively from the gray-dominated palette of the earlier work into color. The red of meat, the colors of packaging, and the surfaces of vegetables and retail displays appear as stages in a chain of production and consumption. In the Prix Pictet theme “Consumption,” the sequence from field to point of sale brought into view the nature and labor that recede behind consumer goods.^*8 Each time the subject changed—from city to history, women, or food—Schmidt reconfigured distance, tonality, color, and image source. For each subject, he rebuilt the rules of looking instead of using a fixed style as proof of authorship. ^*16

After the Bechers: German Photography Without a Unified Style

Viewed together, Schmidt’s photographs and teaching make clear the alternative route he opened within postwar German photography. Where the Bechers standardized shooting conditions, Schmidt changed distance, grain, tonality, image source, and print size from one series to the next. The subject determined the measure anew each time. The Werkstatt für Photographie functioned as a forum where different ideas of photography, including American work, could meet in Berlin, not as a school devoted to transmitting a single style.^*11 In his own work Schmidt preserved disagreement among images; in teaching he set different photographic positions against one another. Across both activities, multiple readings were allowed to coexist. Later reassessment of the Werkstatt as an independent lineage has complicated a history of postwar German photography once centered more narrowly on the Bechers.^{*12 *13 *26}

The shift embodied by Waffenruhe became a focus of criticism almost immediately after its publication.^*17 Soon after the 1987 publication, Berlin critics described the work in terms such as a “wounded city” and “ceasefire but not peace,” recognizing its turn toward the constricted feeling of everyday life. The bibliography in the Michael Schmidt Archive records numerous reviews from Berlin, Essen, Salzburg, New York, and elsewhere in 1987–88 alone.^*33 In a private letter from 1987, Lewis Baltz called Waffenruhe a “masterpiece.” The letter shows that Schmidt’s fragmented editing registered as a significant shift even to a generation associated with New Topographics.^*34 In 1988–89, Schmidt was included in MoMA’s New Photography 4, bringing this locally rooted Berlin work into an international discussion of contemporary photography.^*27 Even while the Wall still stood, Waffenruhe was being read as a work that turned the experience of the city as an accumulation of fragments into form. ^*28

Later reassessment shifted attention from the darkness of individual photographs to spreads, inserted text, and page order. Around the 2018 reissue, photographs and Einar Schleef’s text were projected onto the exterior of Berlin’s Volksbühne, restaging the 1987 book in public space. Fotogeschichte likewise treated the reissue as a photobook classic, rereading it as a work in which photographs, text, and interruptions in pagination operate together.^*17 In 2020, however, Daniel Berndt warned that a chronological retrospective can canonize the work as a narrative of “finding one’s voice.”^*34 As attention expanded from the wounded city to editing, education, and the archive, the very act of unifying Schmidt’s disparate series into a single artistic identity became a critical problem. Waffenruhe sets images against text, Ein-heit sets his own photographs against found images, and Lebensmittel sets production against consumption. Across these projects, the continuity is an editorial refusal to erase contradiction rather than a consistent visual style.^*18 Through that method, subjects easily reduced to a single narrative—reunification or postwar history—could remain in photography as experiences of comparing multiple, conflicting sources. ^{*2 *30}