Michael Schmidt

Author of now-classic photobooks such as Waffenruhe and Berlin-Wedding, Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt (1945-2014) was acclaimed in his lifetime for his black-and-white, documentary-style depictions of his native city. This is the first full appraisal of his work, featuring numerous images of working material such as work prints or book dummies, as well as archival material—invitation cards, posters and exhibition views. Essays by Ute Eskildsen, Janos Frecot, Peter Galassi, Heinz Liesbrock and Thomas Weski, who worked closely with Schmidt on various projects during his lifetime, complement these materials.

Schmidt was born on 6 October 1945 in East Berlin, five months after the German surrender. His family crossed to West Berlin before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. His earliest series on Berlin, Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974-75) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976-80), established the idiom he would pursue for the rest of his life.

After the reissue of German photographer Michael Schmidt’s (1945–2014) legendary photobook Waffenruhe (1987) comes a new edition of Berlin-Wedding (1978), collecting his documentary-style images of Berlin’s Wedding district.

Waffenruhe, a now classic photobook by Michael Schmidt (1945–2014), was first published in 1987 by the Berlin-based Dirk Nishen Verlag. It quickly sold out and continues to fetch high prices on the antiquarian book market; it is reprinted here for the first time. The book is Schmidt's portrait of a still-divided Berlin: it brings together surprising combinations of high-contrast, black-and-white images to express a generation's dystopian sense of life shortly before the fall of the Wall. Schmidt evokes a world of ruptures and absences that eschews any comprehensive perspective.

The images combine with a text by author and director Einar Schleef to create a brusque, entirely individual vision of the fragility of human existence—a book that is regularly included among the most influential photographic books of the 20th century.