Johannes Schmidt

Johannes Schmidt creates cameraless photograms & lumenprints with plants & historic papers, blending chemistry, chance & surreal beauty. Stunning colours, textures & subconscious connections.
From: Born in Germany, lives in Nantes, France
Shows: Chemigrams, lumenprints, toned cyanotypes

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Johannes Schmidt is a self-taught amateur. A pinhole workshop brought him in a darkroom, where he later discovered his passion for cameraless photography. He became fascinated by light, supports, photosensitive matter and photochemistry, and his interest in ancient techniques and formulas is nourrished by his initial training as pharmaceutical technical assistant. In his photogram practice he feels close to the surrealistic approach of automatic gestures, with non-figurative images favouring free associations, coming from the spectators subconscious mind.

In recent years he began to explore lumenprints and the interaction between plantsaps and silvergelatin of different papers, observing effects between paper and different tissus like ovaries and anthers with a high metabolic activity, of pigment-rich petals or tannin-containing leaves. In the ‘Bird of paradise flower’ series he obtained the most outstanding colours he has yet observed on an old Tura textile paper, which was formerly used for portrait photography.

A few cyanotypes come from the ‘illustrated colour chart’. Photograms of tannin-rich plants were made on two papers with different coatings, then bleached and toned with a decoction of the illustrated plant. Differences in colour and solidity between the group of ellagitannins and gallotannins as described for dye plants can be found in a minor degree also on paper.