Waffenruhe [Ceasefire].

with a flyer

Michael Schmidt was born in Berlin and photographed the city extensively. In the 1980s, he established the Werkstatt für Fotographie, a collective based at the Volkshochschule Kreuzberg in Berlin, which invited many American photographers, including William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, Larry Clark, Lewis Baltz, and John Gossage, to Berlin, where they made work and gave workshops. The resulting cross-fertilisation of ideas led to several key books of the late 1980s, most notably Schmidt's own Waffenruhe, a portrait of the city made a few years before the fall of communism; it is one of the key works of the late twentieth century. It focuses on scenes of urban decay around the Wall and the surrounding Kreuzberg district, interspersed with portraits of young Berliners, emphasising the psychological impact of the city's division.

Waffenruhe's importance was immediately recognised. Lewis Baltz responded to the work in Camera Austria no. 26: 'Waffenruhe does not resemble anything that preceded it. The most striking quality of the book is its intensity. Schmidt's images and their sequence have a rigor that makes them hard to look at and impossible to wipe off the table. In his earlier works Schmidt had documented the social artifacts of contemporary Berlin; with Waffenruhe he created an autonomous work, a new cultural artifact standing for itself, something whose existence changes the world it records.'

In his brief afterword, Janos Frecot refers to Waffenruhe as not being a book about Berlin, but a book that could have only been inspired by Berlin, a cri-de-coeur that could only have emanated from a Berliner.

First edition; (299 x 265 mm, 11 3/4 x 10 1/2 in); black & white photographs, texts by Einar Schleef and Janos Frecot; sewn adhesive-bound white wrappers, light shelfwear, white photo-illustrated dust-jacket affixed to spine as issued, light wear, nick to lower side bottom edge, contemporary flyer with an original text by Simone Kubach laid in, an excellent copy; [80]pp. including one gatefold.

The Open Book pp336-7; Parr/Badger, The Photobook: A History II, p65; Ebner et al., Werkstatt fur Photographie 1976-1986.