From Potsdamer Platz I walked the short distance south-east to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Niederkirchnerstraße, for the exhibition of photographs by Berliner Michael Schmidt entitled ‘Lebensmittel’ (‘Food’). Schmidt (born in 1945) has spent five years planning and implementing this photographic essay on the processing of foodstuffs in Europe; since 2006 “he has been photographing Norway’s fish farms, Germany’s industrial bakeries & Italy’s apple-processing industry”.
It sounded an interesting project: combining art and creative photography with observation and comment on the people and processes of the industry.
But I found it disappointing. Most of the images failed to excite me. Many of the food shots appeared casually composed and lit with “flash on camera”: perhaps they were carefully contrived to look that way, but for me it didn’t work. Without them looking like studio shots I wanted more precision in the composition, and softer, more thoughtful lighting. A few images of people working in fields were natural and more satisfying.
The collection on display didn’t really work as comment either. The juxtaposition of images felt too random, especially the 30-40 photos on one of the big walls on the top floor of the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Almost nowhere did adjacent images work against each other to make a point. Rather better, in my view, was the heavy €59 book of the project, where the print quality was much improved (or benefitted from a smaller image size), and the page layout of one or two images to a spread enabled more thoughtful matches.
I had a brief discussion with two German ladies who had been in the exhibition and had spent much time studying the book. They completely disagreed with me and felt the exhibition was a strong social comment on the complexities and contradictions in the production of our everyday food. But writers of most of the comments (75% perhaps) in the visitors’ book for the exhibition – which opened only two days ago – seemed sceptical like me.
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