Format: Physical book containing a DVD.
Price: £40 (you can watch the video for free)
Links: Schmidtbooks, Blurb and YouTube
Comment: Say what you want about Andreas Schmidt, but I like the fact that he's always challenging, pushing and playing with the photobook medium. He doesn't think twice and asks for your opinion, he just puts it out there. Some context about this book below.
Comment: Say what you want about Andreas Schmidt, but I like the fact that he's always challenging, pushing and playing with the photobook medium. He doesn't think twice and asks for your opinion, he just puts it out there. Some context about this book below.
"Is it a book? Is it a photo-book? Or is it a film?
Andreas Schmidt's book "29.2 Seconds, Thursday 30th May 2013, 2:44 PM, Villa Lumière, Lyon" is a conundrum. The cover image of the book shows a film still from a YouTube upload (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfOV7Zuvrrc) of the same silent movie and, apart from a short explanatory text, the book only contains a single DVD onto which the film has been transferred. As the title indicates, Schmidt filmed it, situated on the main staircase at Villa Lumière in Lyon, through a window - a classic framing device used throughout the history of the medium by many photographers and filmmakers alike. In the distance we can observe nursery children on their break, running about and somewhat resembling speeded up planets orbiting around each other, almost as if we are looking at a little 29.2 second explanation of the universe.
The artist filmed this short scene a little more than 118 years after the Lumière brothers filmed their workers leaving their factory at the birthplace of cinema http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO0EkMKfgJI with what could be considered a pretty rudimentary device, a Canon G10 Digital Compact Camera; a present-day apparatus maybe much more sophisticated but essentially not so different from the Lumière brothers' own Cinématographe, which was an all-in-one camera that also served as a film projector and developer.
In another 118 years time will anyone still be able to watch Schmidt's DVD? Quite possibly there will be no device left to play it on. Maybe a good museum will show it? Or your grand-children or great-grand-children can show the book and tell the story." Schmidtbooks
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