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Michael Schmidt German, born 1945 Schmidt first gained attention in 1973 with Berlin-Kreuzberg, a series of photographs of the quarter where he still lives. In Berlin Stadtbilder (Images of the City) (1976-80), Schmidt explored the architecture of the city, depicting the apartment blocks and office buildings in an austere, documentary style. With Ceasefire (1987) he developed a more dynamic approach, using tightly cropped images and a shallow depth of field to show young Berliners alongside scenes of urban decay, the Berlin wall, and graffitied swastikas. The series captures the fraught claustrophobia of life in the then-divided city.		Thomas Ruff August Sander Bernd and Hilla Becher Thomas Struth Fazal Sheikh Michael Schmidt Robert Frank Stephen Shore Walker Evans Nicholas Nixon William Eggleston   Philip-Lorca diCorcia Robert Adams Albert Renger-Patzsch Lee Friedlander Lewis Baltz Paul Graham Garry Winogrand Andreas Gursky Boris Mikhailov Diane Arbus Rineke Dijkstra Martin Parr

With Self (1985-9), Schmidt turned the camera on himself as an act of ruthless personal analysis, creating a number of fragmentary self-portraits taken from unusual angles, and sometimes showing only his genitals or a dark silhouette on the wall. As in all Schmidt’s work, photography becomes a tool for inspection and insight.