Michael Schmidt’s book „Unity“ is a boring book. Drab grey on bleak grey, stuffed with reproductions whose meaning only would be accessible to me, if I would have a bigger visual background knowledge about this historical subject matter.

There is the boredom that emerges from the eternal repetition of the already seen:
images that look like images of countless other artist, art that looks like art supposed to look, art that is just going through the required motions.

Michael Schmidt’s Unity is boring in a different manner.

It’s the boredom of a project that’s strength is based on its conception; it is the boredom of a project not solely striving for catchy beauty.

Hans Peter Feldman’s boring “ 100 Portraits” are touching me, because they cleverly mark a trace in time, and still fail to identify this impalpable aging process we are subjected to.

Peter Piller examines these constantly alike and constantly boring aerial images of German family homes, regarding their similarities and differences. He mocks the systematics of scientific studies, and though it could be meant dead seriously, there are sufficient clues to assume that the humor inherent to the chosen categories is definitely intentional. As unbearable the aesthetics of these awkwardly configured, but surely earthquake-proof homes are, from Peter Pillers airy point of view they become rather comical.

Michael Schmidt’s Unity in contrast doesn’t bear the slightest mark of humor. His still-lifes made the access to his book a bit easier for me. I am looking at his images, sense the historical meaning of some of the personalities found back in the archives, believe to recognize the construction drawing of a incinerator furnace, or the layout of a concentration camp. I see masses marching and I see men in uniforms, I see propaganda icons and ugly apartment decorations that turn into eye candy through Schmidt’s photography. My enjoyment of the aestheticisation of the ugly gets some nourishment here.
“Unity”: a gloomy book with moments of dread referring to German history.

German history, that is also the history of evil, the evil that humans were capable to do, that humans still, and will be forever are capable to do. Here, and there and everywhere.

All images by Michael Schmidt/ UNITY; 1996.
I extracted the beginning sequence and a sequence from the last third of the book that contains about 160 images on the whole.