Irgendwo, 2001-2004
© Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt, born 1945, is one of Germany’s most important photographers in the the social and documentary field - exploring the long-term social and political scars of WWII and the division of Germany. Schmidt, who started out his career as a police officer, first gained attention in 1984 with Berlin - Kreuzberg, a series of black and white photographs of the quarter where he still lives. He is also often associated with his other works, Waffenruhe (1987) and, my favorite, EIN-HEIT (1996).

Schmidt has been quoted as saying, boldly, “I consider my brand of black and white photography to be colour photography.”

Recently released was Irgendwo (2005) - translated as “Somewhere” or “Anywhere” - photographs of small German provincial towns. Carefully sequenced and grouped, the portraits, landscapes, architectural details of the book present, as Schmidt states, a portrait of our subjective loss of “home as a place with identity.”

Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you. You remember places because you spent the most wonderful or the most horrible time there during your childhood. But these places have become more arbitrary, less specific… There is no such thing as an objective category that one might call ‘home’ any more. Such things take place subjectively nowadays.

Irgendwo, 2001-2004
© Michael Schmidt

Irgendwo, 2001-2004
© Michael Schmidt

There is a truly startling contrast between the uneasiness and repression of the spaces that Schmidt chooses to photograph and the affectionate portraits that he makes of local teens.

This book or, rather, the work in general carries a lot of weight.

Dashwood still has copies of Irgendwo - get yourself one here.

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