Unfortunate Selfies

A compilation of international news reports about (mostly lethal) accidents that happened while and because people were distracted by taking selfies. Many of these incidents seem so surreal that we find it hard to believe what we read. But all the accidents described in this book really happened, the facts are double-checked.
Unfortunate Selfies was nominated for the Prix Bob Calle 2019 du livre d’artiste.
2016
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 76 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

Found on Flickr

This book is the printed version of a weblog published from August 2008 through December 2009 when I explored the realm of the photo hosting site Flickr while working on the project Other People’s Photographs. The book includes photos found on Flickr, observations, comments, and questions that emerged in the process. It can be read as a casual journal that provides an insight into the making of the project.
2013
print on demand, b/w
21.5 x 14 cm, 272 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
20 €

Steuerfreie Einkünfte

Steuerfreie Einkünfte (tax-free income) is a new work consisting of annual reports that are published in book form.
2012 ongoing
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm each, variable number of pages
softcover, perfect bound
open editions

This series of print-on-demand books is discontinued due to the provider’s insufficient service. An edition of annual reports will be available when the project is completed.

Borrowed

Thirty-four Madonna Inn postcards in a book with a blue cover, entitled Borrowed. If you prefer books with red covers you may prefer Replicated. Both books are part of ABCED, a multi-volume book project created by members of ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative to celebrate Ed Ruscha’s seventy-fifth birthday. ABCED was available from December 2012 until December 2013 only.
2012
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
no longer available

Replicated

Thirty-four Madonna Inn postcards in a book with a red cover, entitled Replicated. If you prefer books with blue covers you may prefer Borrowed. Both books are part of ABCED, a multi-volume book project created by members of ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative to celebrate Ed Ruscha’s seventy-fifth birthday. ABCED was available from December 2012 until December 2013 only.
2012
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
no longer available

Are you searching for me?

There are many Joachim Schmids. Some play a role in public life, others don’t. People who wish to learn what we do or what we did, what we wrote or what we said, begin by searching the internet. It’s all there: names, dates, pictures and the rest. Thanks to the search engine the world has become transparent and there are no more secrets. Or so we think. If it’s me you’re looking for, most of the information you’ll find is not correct.
2012, 2013 (expanded version)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 64 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition (discontinued in 2015)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Photography

The internet is flooded with billions of snapshots, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. You’ll find answers to all these questions in this book. In addition, you’ll also find answers to questions you never asked.
2012
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 80 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

Awesome Errors, Dreadful Glitches

The internet is flooded with billions of snapshots, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Awesome Errors, Dreadful Glitches is about the photographic errors, mistakes, glitches, and malfunctions that so many find fascinating. Contrary to popular belief, people do not simply delete pictures when they go wrong, they often develop an affection and curiosity for them, uploading them to photo sharing sites in huge numbers and helping create an apparently booming sub-genre of photography.
2012 (the 2012 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 80 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

American Photographs

Walker Evans’ American Photographs is considered by many to be one of the most important photobooks ever published. Made on the occasion of his one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 – the first MoMA exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer – the book went on to influence generations of photographers.
This remake of a classic explores the possibility that in the past decades, almost everything has been photographed and that in the photographic universe anything we wish to see is readily available to us. Drawing on the constantly growing resource of online photo hosting sites and using the original captions of Evans’ celebrated photographs as search terms, this new edition of American Photographs offers a modern equivalent of Evans’ masterpiece, compiled entirely of found photographs and created with the help of a search engine instead of a camera.
2011
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 110 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
40 €

Around the World in Eighty Minutes

A World Expo may have made sense a century ago but since the invention of television the idea seems obsolete. In Shanghai, China, the basic premise is to wait in lines; incredibly long lines. Occasionally, a speaker system announces three hours waiting time for this pavilion, seven hours here, five hours there. Queuing for hours to visit something I never wanted to see is not my idea of fun. Yet here I am, with a group of students I’m obliged to accompany, watching our tour guide hand out hats to make sure we look as ridiculous as every other tour group. Fortunately, it isn’t long before I lose them but what do you do in a world exhibition filled with several hundred thousand Chinese? Over a cup of coffee I forge a plan: Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
The plan is to walk around the site without entering a single pavilion. In front of each pavilion, I take a self-portrait in the style of the modern tourist: camera at arm’s length with the attraction behind me. “I was there,” the picture says. So I don my hat and begin the journey, visiting about eighty countries and spending only a minute in each without even pausing to examine the pictures. I miss a country or two, but that’s to be expected when you travel in a rush.
2011
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm, 178 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition (discontinued in 2015)

Vierzig Jahre

I have been collecting photographs for forty years. Some ended up in my works, others were discarded, and the rest I preserved in my collection despite not knowing what to do with them. The earliest of these survivors is a series of nineteen portraits reproduced in this book – portraits that have endured four continuous decades of sifting, disposal and preservation. There must be a reason for this.
2011
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm, 40 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

L.A. Women

In December 2010, Los Angeles Police Department released one hundred and eighty photographs that were found in the possession of a serial murder suspect. All of them are photographs of women. These women may or may not be residents of Los Angeles, they may or may not be prostitutes (as were the women in the investigation). They may or may not be murder victims. We don’t know. We don’t even know whether the arrested suspect took these photographs himself.
Without knowing where the photographs come from, most of them wouldn’t be worth a second glance; for you and me, that is. Of course this is different for friends and family of the women depicted. And it is certainly different for the person who took these pictures. From the testimony of one surviving victim we know that the woman was first photographed, then shot, and then raped before she was dumped in the street.
Most of the women were clearly alive when the photos were taken; some are smiling, some are posing. Some appear to be asleep, they may or may not be sleeping the big sleep. Some of them may have been shot soon after or just before the photographer shot the picture. We don’t know.
It is actually the fact that we don’t know anything – apart from the context where these photographs come from – that makes them so eerie. We want to know more but the pictures don’t tell us. We look at them and they look at us. That’s all there is.
L.A. Women received an honorable mention in the 2011 Photography Book Now competition.
2011
print on demand, colour, uncoated paper
18 x 18 cm, 154 pages
hardcover with dust jacket
open edition
96 €
(a slightly different edition of 50 copies with one extra sheet was launched at the 4th International Photobook Festival Kassel in 2011)

Seventy-Five Are Better Than Thirty-Two

Millions of tourists travel to New York City every year. Many of them visit the Museum of Modern Art. Many of them take photographs inside the museum. Many of them show Andy Warhol‘s thirty-two pictures of Campbell‘s soup cans. Thousands of these snapshots are to be found on photo sharing sites. Seventy-five of them are collected in this book – works of art in the age of digital photography.
Nearly forty years after Warhol made his Mona Lisa paraphrase Thirty Are Better Than One he might well agree today that seventy-five are better than thirty-two.
2011
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 160 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition / discontinued

Lost Memories

In the age of digital photography, taking snapshots has become a reliably constant background sound of everyday life, in fact everywhere we turn there is somebody taking photographs. It has got to the point that we can’t imagine life without the possibility of a camera recording it. Losing a camera, and indeed these visual recordings of everyday activities is, for most people, an awfully emotional scenario to find oneself in. And it happens more often than we may think. Perhaps unsurprisingly a number of websites have been created as an antidote for this. Their purpose? To reunite people with their lost cameras and in turn, their lost photographs. 
Lost Memories documents some of these Internet messages, or pleas of people who are desperately seeking their lost cameras. Many of them are heart-wrenching distress calls that disclose the importance of photographs in modern life. The book is a compilation of such desperate attempts to retrieve personal lost treasures. Every cry for help evokes Bruce Chatwin’s observation that “to lose a passport was the least of one’s worries; to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”
2012 (the 2010 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 80 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

But Is It Art?

The internet is flooded with billions of snapshots, many of which are hosted on photo sharing sites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. But is it Art? is a new addition to my series of black books exploring the realm of online photo hosting sites. The book contains images that are screenshots, specifically from the website Flickr. Each image shows people’s attempts at creating photography “after”, “based on”, “in the style of” or “inspired by” well-known artists, to varying degrees of success. As individual attempts these samples may be charming, hilarious or bold (and sometimes embarrassing), as a group they raise more interesting questions of originality and authorship.
But Is It Art? was shortlisted for the 2011 Artists’ Book of the Moment award.
2012 (the 2010 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 120 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

Quick Response

Quick Response is a hands-on introduction into the realm of QR code applications and demonstrates a way in which two-dimensional bar codes can be used to view images. People have to “read” this book by taking photos of each page using a cameraphone. The phone’s QR code reader will then decode the abstract image to reveal that each of them is an encoded URL for a photograph hosted on Flickr. The series of photos demonstrates the variety of modern commercial, artistic and subversive QR code applications. In addition, the book demonstrates a new way of appropriating other people’s photographs.
2012 (the 2010 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 40 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

O Campo

O Campo, or in its translation The Field, is a photographic compilation of football fields in Brazilian cities. The images were taken via satellite and they show the rather oddly shaped football pitches that seem to be built wherever possible – the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws of the game. According to the official rules and regulations (which are included in the book as an epilogue) you would not be allowed to play football on any of these fields. However, the careers of some of the world’s best football players began on these very same fields despite their askew angles, odd proportions, mis-shapen border lines and pitch markings. Studying the architectural contexts of these fields we also get an idea about the social context where these players come from.
O Campo received an honorable mention in the 2010 Photography Book Now competition.
2010
print on demand, colour
20 x 25 cm, 40 pages
softcover (hardcover with dust jacket on request)
open edition
48 €

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, A Few Palm Trees, No Small Fires

Between 1963 and 1972, Edward Ruscha published fifteen artist’s books, his first being Twentysix Gasoline Stations; a book which is considered to be the first modern artist’s book, and has become the iconic precursor and a major influence on the emerging international artists’ books culture. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Nine Swimming Pools, A Few Palm Trees, No Small Fires is a modern remake of some of Ruscha’s famous books, all grouped in one volume. Unlike the original books it relates to, this work was made entirely at my Berlin studio. I didn’t visit Los Angeles to make the book and I didn’t use a camera either. The camera is out there.
2009
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 198 pages
softcover (hardcover with dust jacket on request)
open edition
64 €

Joachim Schmid Is Martin Parr · Martin Parr Is Joachim Schmid

In September 2009 Martin Parr sent me his VIP pass to the Berlin Art Forum, that he had recently received and knew full well, he would be unable to attend. I saw this as an opportunity to visit the fair and take photos in the spirit of Martin Parr. I was to be Martin Parr for the 23rd September. For those that know anything about my work, this must be a surprise, as my career in the art world is based entirely on orchestrating other people’s photographs.
I then invited Martin to be Joachim Schmid, and he decided to trawl through the “Martin Parr, We Love You” group on Flickr. This was established a few years ago as a forum for photographers who had been seemingly influenced by his photographic language. So in the spirit of Joachim Schmid, Martin looked for the most “Parr-like” images. The resulting two sets of images are what you will find on the pages of Joachim Schmid is Martin Parr · Martin Parr is Joachim Schmid.
2009
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 40 pages
softcover (hardcover with dust jacket on request)
open edition / discontinued

In Dialogue

This book is the result of an experimental process of non-verbal communication. Between November 2008 and January 2009, Marcelo Brodsky and me had a dialogue without any words, without any emphasis on a particular subject, without any pre-conceived ideas — a dialogue about nothing. The two of us took turns exchanging photographs by email, each one a direct response to the previous one, creating a continuous and meandering photographic ping-pong through the visual universe. Despite the lack of obvious subject matter the resulting sequence of photographs creates meaning. For the viewers it is an invitation to retrace the decisions made by two brains working in visual rather than verbal mode.
2009
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 40 pages
softcover (hardcover with dust jacket on request)
open edition / discontinued

Bilder von der Straße

Bilder von der Straße (Pictures from the Street) is a thirty-year project which began in 1982 and ended in 2012. During this time I picked up one thousand lost or abandoned photographs from the world’s pavements. Although the collection has been exhibited widely, this is the first time it is printed as a complete set. Published in four volumes, the books present every found photograph or its fragments in their original size and in the chronological order they were discovered. No artistic intervention has taken place except for the inclusion of the date and location where each picture was found. As well as providing a record of my travels, the books document people’s use and abuse of photographs, with almost all the photographs in the collection depicting people and more than half of these being ripped or defaced in some way.
This act of discarding or destroying individual photographs seems to point to a desire to eliminate memories of specific moments in people’s lives. By encouraging viewers to imagine the stories of the people depicted, the project raises questions about the emotionally-charged events that could warrant such destruction. I consider this collection to be a social documentary consisting of both visual artefacts and human documents. Produced in a systematic manner, it is an inventory of lost photographs and memories that hint at the mysteries of people’s private lives and at their attempts to document and destroy them.
2012 (the 2009 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, colour
29.7 x 21 cm, 4 volumes in a box, 256 pages each
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
240 €

The Missing Pictures

Between 2006 to 2008 I completed a series of works based on imagery found on the Internet. These works are a continuation from the Archiv project, altered to suit the circumstances of modern technologies. Digital photography, Internet, and photo sharing sites have created a new visual environment and new forms of producing, distributing and using photographs. Digital multichannel photo installations such as Netzerscheinungen and Reload were my response to this new situation, researching the realm of online photography for recurring motifs and patterns. A small selection of photographs incorporated into these works have been presented on my website. Since receiving several complaints by photographers who found their images on my site I have replaced the images with placeholders denoting a removed or missing image. This has also turned into a new book. The book contains the complete set of these icons indicating that something went wrong with a photograph. It goes without saying that these were found on the Internet as well, just like the photographs they replace.
2012 (the 2009 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 40 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

Cool Pictures, Cool Stuff

The internet is flooded with billions of snapshots, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. One of them is simple, striking and apparently quite popular: “I thought it looked cool.” There is an incredible number of photographs on Fickr that people have taken because they thought something looked ‘cool’. 
The book consists of 116 images based on various perceptions of what people consider to be ‘cool’. Each picture is accompanied by the photographer’s original caption. The resulting collection of images is very revealing and often hilarious.
2012 (the 2009 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 120 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

When Boredom Strikes

The internet is flooded with billions of snapshots, many of which are hosted on photo sharing websites like Flickr. With millions more added every day, we often wonder why people decide to take these pictures, why they save them, why they put them on public display. Studying the captions and descriptions of these photographs we see a variety of reasons for their existence. One of them is simple, striking and apparently quite popular: boredom. There is an incredible number of photographs on Fickr that people have taken just because they’ve been bored. 
The book assembles 156 photographs made on account of boredom. Each picture is accompanied by the photographer’s original caption. In stark contrast to the title this book isn’t boring at all, but very revealing and often hilarious.
2012 (the 2009 Blurb edition is discontinued)
print on demand, b/w
17.5 x 11 cm, 160 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition
12 €

The Showbag Book

This book is composed of snapshots found on the many sites of the world’s ever-growing online picture pool. Each book is customised for the individual buyer, containing 24 to 240 pages. There are no two identical copies of The Showbag Book. The books range from 24 to 240 pages. Please specify the desired number of pages when ordering your copy.
Print on demand, hardcover with dust jacket, 18 x 18 cm, 24 – 240 pages, 20 – 236 photographs
2008 ongoing
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 24–240 pages
hardcover with dust jacket
unique editions, signed
price on application
email orders only

Other People’s Photographs (2008–2011)

Assembled between 2008 and 2011, this series of ninety-six print-on-demand books explores the themes presented by modern everyday, amateur photo­graphers. Images found on photo sharing sites such as Flickr have been gathered and ordered in a way to form a library of contemporary vernacular photography in the age of digital technology and online photo hosting. Each book is comprised of images that focus on a specific photo­graphic event or idea, the grouping of photographs revealing recurring patterns in modern popular photography. The approach is encyclopedic, and the number of volumes is virtually endless but arbitrarily limited. The selection of themes is neither systematic nor does it follow any established criteria — the project’s structure mirrors the multifaceted, contradictory and chaotic practice of modern photography itself, based exclusively on the motto “You can observe a lot by watching.”
The series Other People‘s Photographs includes these titles: Airline Meals · Airports · Another Self · Apparel · At Work · Bags · Big Fish · Bird’s Eyes · Black Bulls · Blue · Bread · Buddies · Cash · Cheques · Cleavage · Coffee · Collections · Colour · Commodities · Contents · Currywurst · Damage · Digits · Documents · Dogs · Drinks · Encounters · Evidence · Eyes · Faces in Holes · Fauna · Feet · First Shots · Fish · Flashing · Food · Fridge Doors · Gathered Together · Gender · Geology · Hands · Happy Birthday · Hotel Rooms · Images · Impact · In Motion · Indexes · Information · Interaction · Kisses for Me · Lego · Looking · Maps · Mickey · Models · More Things · Mugshots · News · Nothing Wrong · November 5th, 2008 · Objects in Mirror · On the Road · Parking Lots · Pictures · Pizza · Plush · Portraits · Postcards · Purple · Pyramids · Real Estate · Red · Room with a View · Self · Sex · Shadow · Shirts · Shoes · Silvercup · Sites · Size Matters · Space-Time · Statues · Sunset · Surface · Targets · Television · The Other Picture · The Picture · Things · Trophies · Tropic of Capricorn · Various Accidents · Wanted · Writings · You Are Here.
2008–2011
print on demand, colour
18 x 18 cm, 36 pages each
hardcover with dust jacket
open edition, numbered and signed
price on application
email orders only
see also the 2 volume paperback version

View more photos

More print-on-demand books

I am very pleased to announce that I completed the project Other People’s Photographs with the launch of the last six volumes in this series:

The series Other People‘s Photographs includes these titles: Airline Meals · Airports · Another Self · Apparel · At Work · Bags · Big Fish · Bird’s Eyes · Black Bulls · Blue · Bread · Buddies · Cash · Cheques · Cleavage · Coffee · Collections · Colour · Commodities · Contents · Currywurst · Damage · Digits · Documents · Dogs · Drinks · Encounters · Evidence · Eyes · Faces in Holes · Fauna · Feet · First Shots · Fish · Flashing · Food · Fridge Doors · Gathered Together · Gender · Geology · Hands · Happy Birthday · Hotel Rooms · Images · Impact · In Motion · Indexes · Information · Interaction · Kisses for Me · Lego · Looking · Maps · Mickey · Models · More Things · Mugshots · News · Nothing Wrong · November 5th, 2008 · Objects in Mirror · On the Road · Parking Lots · Pictures · Pizza · Plush · Portraits · Postcards · Purple · Pyramids · Real Estate · Red · Room with a View · Self · Sex · Shadow · Shirts · Shoes · Silvercup · Sites · Size Matters · Space-Time · Statues · Sunset · Surface · Targets · Television · The Other Picture · The Picture · Things · Trophies · Tropic of Capricorn · Various Accidents · Wanted · Writings · You Are Here.
The books are available individually or as a boxed set of 96 volumes (hardcover with dust jacket, 18 x 18 cm, 36 pages each).

More print-on-demand books

There’s also a new book in the black series, The Missing Pictures.

I’ll be presenting my books at the New York Art Book Fair this year. The fair will be held at PS1 Contemporary Art Center from October 2–4 with a preview on October 1st.

Print-on-demand books

A new series of books are now available, printed on demand and only obtainable through this website. Each book is produced for the individual buyer. The editions are unlimited, but each book will be numbered and signed. The books are priced at 1 € per page and range from 24 to 240 pages. The following books are available to order now. More titles will be added throughout 2008 and in coming years.
Other People’s Photographs is a virtually all-encompassing series of books exploring the realm of amateur photography in the age of online photo hosting. The first five titles are now available, many more will follow. Each book contains 32 photographs focussing on one particular subject. The series will eventually form an encyclopedic library of digital photography. Hardcover with dust jacket, 18 x 18 cm, 36 pages, 32 photographs each.
The Showbag Book is composed of snapshots found on the many sites of the world’s ever-growing online picture pool. Each book is customised for the individual buyer, containing 24 to 240 pages. There are no two identical copies of The Showbag Book. Please specify the desired number of pages when ordering your copy. Hardcover with dust jacket, 18 x 18 cm, 24 – 240 pages, 20 – 236 photographs.