Joachim Schmid

There are millions of photographs being produced around the world every day; most of them have no second thought towards them, useless snapshots that’s added to the uncountable number of images in the world’s print/online libraries. Each one is contributing to using paper, chemicals, storage and ultimately visual pollution. This is the view of photographer, Joachim Schmid. Joachim Schmid is a German based photographer who has been working with used photography since the early 1980s. At first he would purchase large amounts of used photographs and public images in flee markets that became his body of work. It was his awareness of consumerism and recycling that drove him to start collecting used art as well as his passion for photographic history. In 1990 he started a group called Reprocessing of Used Photographs, where he would ask people to send in old photographs instead of throwing them out, where they could be analyzed and deemed useful or worthless, in which case they would be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. He uses the photographs in a large variety of ways from merging two or more different images together to tearing up and repositioning segments of photographs as well as simply just arranging a group of images and presenting them in different ways.

Heres an image i found that had already been cut out. I found it interesting because its a family photograph that was found in my house, yet no one can recall who was sitting there and why they where taken out. This is what I like about found photography, each image has an unknown history and all the audience can do is speculate. I inserted the question mark myself keeping it within the text & image project.

NINE ERRORS A recent project named Nine Errors takes a step into the modern world of technology and smart phones. When I came across this I found it without a doubt the most interesting/diverse form or photography I have ever seen. It starts with a QR code, a barcode that can only be scanned and recognized by smart phones. Schmid created these codes and publically posted them around the world in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam ect. Once the public scan the code on their phone they would be taken to his online exhibition. Except unknowing to his audience his work was a selection of images of words and phrases. When a QR was scanned it would take you to one of nine ‘errors’. For example: “404 error: file not found” was what came up on my phone when I scanned one of his codes. Confusing the audience to think that the link was broken, when really they were looking at his work. Now with this project can arise debate on whether its classed as 'art' or even photography. But if you break it down, in actual fact you can to take a picture of the QR in order to open it, and the error codes are actually images of words. Making it a form of photography.