Michael Schmidt - Waffenruhe (FIRST PRINTING) - 1987

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SCARCE OPPORTUNITY to purchase this legendary German photobook title by Michael Schmidt:

- Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 2, page 65
- The Open Book, Hasselblad Center, page 336/337
- 802 photo books from the M.+M. Auer collection, page 673

TRUE FIRST ORIGINAL PRINTING FROM 1987 (not to mix with the reprint, published in 2017 and 2018).

Most important and most famous series of the artist who got the first solo exhibition of a German photographer at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York in 1996 (with "U-NI-TY").

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Dirk Nishen Verlag, Berlin, 1987. First edition, first printing

Paperback with dustjacket (as issued). 265 x 300 mm. 84 pages with 39 black&white photos, including 1 gatefold. Photos: Michael Schmidt. Essay by Einar Schleef. Afterword by Janos Frecot. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside very fresh and clean with no marks and with no foxing; first pages with marginal dog-ear, no other remarkable flaws or defects. Dustjacket quiet fresh, complete with no missing parts, but with trace of use; at the bottom of the front with small tear and with some creases. Overall fine condition.

Scarce first printing of the most famous photobook by Michael Schmidt, one of the most important German photobook titles ever published.

Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin and has photo-graphed there since the 1960s. In the 1980s he established the Werkstatt für Fotographie, a collective led based at the Volkshochschule, Kreuzberg in Berlin which invited a number of American photographers such as William Eggleston, Larry Clark, Lewis Baltz, and John Gossage to Berlin where they made work and gave workshops. The resulting cross-fertilisation of ideas resulted in several key books of the late 1980s, including Schmidt's own Waffenruhe, a portrait of the city made a few years before the fall of communism. He focuses on scenes of urban decay around the Wall and the surrounding Kreuzberg district. Schmidt intersperses these photographs with portraits of young Berliners, emphasizing the psychological impact of the city's division. Frecot refers to Waffenruhe as a cri de coeur that could only have eminated from a Berliner.