Eiko Grimberg is concerned with two pivotal subject matters within his work. The first is the way in which we interpret the historical. The second is the way in which we interpret architecture. In his work, these two aspects overlap and produce an air of uncertainty in which dogmatic and ideological thinking is critiqued […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
“I’d been playing drums in a few bands, Th’ Faith Healers and Stereolab among others, and between tours and photo jobs I’d take off on photo projects of my own, often to Berlin. Eventually I got a place in Berlin, because I realised it had a lot of what London was losing, it’s a […]
“The modern city engenders various pathologies, among them agoraphobia and claustrophobia – the one an intense anxiety felt in open spaces, the other, a panic brought about by confinement. Horizont channels both of these aberrations.”
“I think Michael felt the need to discuss the meaning and importance of American photography with a younger generation in Germany who had no experience with these kinds of elderly figures. The National Socialists had either killed or persecuted them in Germany, so for my generation there was no elderly generation in photography.”
“Berlin was cold and grey… but we made up the “scene” an alien escape from this condition… no morals, cold and hot and cruel and shiny, all at once… excessive for sure. The free spirit of the city supplied a fertile ground for life as an experiment”
“Though the clues to what could be considered “absent” “voided” or “gone” are not to be entirely championed nor ignored, the work follows a circular format. It is an examination of place and home and the subject’s way of seeing the familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This inquiry of Schmidt’s is adept if not deftly demonstrative.”
“One form of defense from this snobbism was to create a sort of puritanism within photography – a little village kind of mentality. Our things, our games. Let’s not engage with the outer world as they are mean to us.”
“The impure spectacle of such visions are entitled to the epileptic alone though the corroboration of these events can be described by other seizure subscribers partially as “primordial” for lack of cohesive unanimous declaration”
”The whole city though I am only in a neighborhood seems capable of changing its face as I am carried through it offering possibilities for omni-architectural and urban planning on rails”. I have this repeating dream in which I am in an urban environment not dissimilar to Berlin. The buildings have a late nineteenth century […]
Kommingen, 2007 Gerry Johansson “Deutschland” at Swedish Photography, 2013 By Sören Schuhmacher, ASX Germany, April 2013 In 1993 and 2005 to 2012 Gerry Johansson drove through the German countryside, visiting 176 places like Alt Horsbüll, Gelsenkirchen or Solingen. He divided Germany into nine sectors, which he then traveled systematically. Rather than visiting only major cities, […]
Not Fade Away: The Face of German History in Michael Schmidt’s Ein-heit By Michael W. Jennings, October, 2003 Fotografieren verboten. Photography forbidden. Is this the coded message that stutters at us in a central image from the photoessay U-ni-ty (Ein-heit) by the contemporary Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt? The cropped image of a sign, perhaps a […]