Michael Schmidt (photographer)

Michael Schmidt (6 October 1945 – 24 May 2014) was a German photographer.

His subjects of interest were Berlin and "the weight of German identity in modern history."

Schmidt was born on 6 October 1945 in East Berlin, five months after the German surrender ended World War II in Europe.

His family crossed to West Berlin before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

In 1965 Schmidt began photographing the streets, buildings and people of West Berlin in a semi-documentary approach.

He began photographing in 1965 when he was 20 years old.

His early series about Berlin, Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974–1975) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976–1980), "mapped out the city in which he lived in a semi-documentary way".

In 1976, he founded the Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography) in Berlin.

In 1976, Schmidt founded the Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography) at the Volkhoschschule (Adult Education Center) in Berlin.

The school "played a critical role in Berlin becoming a transatlantic forum of exchange between European and American photographers."

Other series about Berlin include Berlin-Wedding (1976–1978); Berlin nach 45 (Berlin after 45) (1980); Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) (1985–1987), about the Berlin Wall and those affected by it; and Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) (1991–1994), contemporary urban landscapes and portraits from Germany mixed with historical images from the National Socialist / Nazism period, his response to the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of East and West Germany.

His book Waffenruhe (1987) was included in Parr and Badger's The Photobook: A History, Volume II. He died in 2014, a couple of days after winning the Prix Pictet for Lebensmittel.

Natur (Nature) (1987–1997) contains black and white images of the German landscape.

Lebensmittel (foodstuff) took seven years to make, with Schmidt travelling worldwide.

He photographed "across the spectrum of mass food production, from factory farms" (including salmon farms and dairy farms), and bread factories, "to industrial slaughterhouses and on to plastic-wrapped, sanitised portions of food in supermarkets."

U-nit-y was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1996, Frauen was shown at the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and Lebensmittel, a series about the global food industry, at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

A retrospective of his work was held at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2010.

He went on to make a series of "ambitious projects" there, all in black and white and becoming more impressionistic, until his death in 2014.

Each project was exhibited, then published as a book.

Schmidt was a member of the Düsseldorf School of Photography.

He died on 24 May 2014.

Schmidt's work is held in the following public collection: