Joachim Schmid:

I have liked this guy's works since i first saw some of his 'Photogenetic Drafts' series. These where composites of cut negatives from one studio in germany that he had combined top make a full but distorted portrait image. Other works like his 'Statics' have a conceptual link and are surprisingly similar in their visual outcome to my own work; The Statics where created from images left over from a project that aimed to recycle photographs; from what i have gathered the left over images where thematically organized, this can be seen in their titles and then shredded and then mounted horizontally.
Statics (lingerie catalogue 2), 2000, 40 x 50 cm

In an interview for Flasher, Schmid talks about his methodologies for image making but near the end he says something fascinating; 'many of my colleagues think digital-age is the end of photography' and he thinks it's the beginning. The problem here is that he is an artist, who's output is mostly constructed from vernacular photography; he does not shoot these images! I have felt for a long time that photography was at some kind of end or transition. It has taken me years to get a feel for what i think is occurring. Schmid then talks about how he has the time to look at images online, its his profession. I think a key element that Im feeling is that images in the digital domain are breaking away from the paradigm of photography over it chemically manufactured history. Reading this back it seems blindly obvious but then it also seems natural to be looking at other peoples lives via flickr. Again another blog post where Im left lost; i suppose i keep thinking that so many things that fit into an art-historical discourse occur without any artistic intervention. As an additional note Im loosing faith in my own idea; Im looking at what can be done with the ever growing petabytes of images, what can this data do but as he say's "even a complete idiot can take a fascinating photograph" so can a complete idiot create something with all this visual data. - I would like to add that i think this is a terrible post, it only serves to show how confused it get.