An Artist Whose Career Is Based Entirely On Other People’s Photographs

Why take photo when millions upon millions of multitude are taking billions upon billions of them every individual Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , of every subject imaginable ? ArtistJoachim Schmidhas been obsessed with other citizenry ’s photos for years , collecting and re - box them as nontextual matter objects . This great picture from theCarnegie Museum of Art ’s unseeable Photographseries takes a flavour at Schmid ’s singular practice .

We are all intimate with the various tropes of picture taking , and how they unite our visual culture . Just look at something like food picture taking with smartphones — widely mock and practiced at the same time . But nothing quite brings these pattern into perspective like fancy them print and bound , side - by - side in physical mannequin . Schmid started collecting pic before the days of digital , roll around cities picking up cast out images on the street . Now he is occupy with cut across the digital deluge of photos that expand everyday . Schmid self - publishes books found each on a simple construct of pop photography . They are each unique micro - anthropologies , printed and bound .

You may not regard Schmid ’s activity to be prowess , and that would be just fine with him . As he say in the picture , “ essentially I ’m an artist because there ’s no other description for that , but you could call me a conservator or editor or whatever , and I do n’t really care a lot about that . ”