“Tausend Himmel” and the Equivalence Principle, in: Volume – What You See Is What You Hear n° 01, 2010
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In the 1980s, confused by the exponential numbers of photographs everywhere, Joachim Schmid decided not to produce any more new images1. Give or take the odd exception, his artistic activity is devoted essentially to research, collecting, taxonomic filing, and the clipping and semantic recycling of vernacular photographs gathered by way of small ads, on the Internet, or simply found by chance in the street. Joachim Schmid’s work is thus focused on the alteration of photographs that have been taken by other people. “Tausend Himmel” (Thousand Skies), which was first exhibited in 2007 at a retrospective devoted to the artist by the Photographer’s Gallery, considerably alters the principles of this selective collecting.
This series, made up of 1,000 digital photographs shown in a 75-minute loop on two computer screens, present clouds, skies, planes and helicopters. However, following Joachim Schmid’s own admission, his common-or- garden representations actually form “photographs of sounds”. Thus, “Tausend Himmel” offers original opportunities for adopting an acoustic way of looking at the photographic medium.
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