Hannes Schmid: Rockstars

Hannes Schmid, Kraftwerk, 1981, courtesy Hannes Schmid.

Gallery Nicola von Senger, Zurich
Through December 24, 2009

By Oliver Kielmayer

It was rather late when Hannes Schmid (*1946) became interested in contemporary art; besides working for big fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan or designers like Kenzo and Armani, for more than a decade he was busy shooting the Marlboro campaign. His indifference towards contemporary art changed fundamentally in 2003, when he visited the Venice Biennale and found himself in front of one of his own photographs showing a Marlboro cowboy. After the initial shock - Who dares to take a commercial ad photographed by another, blow it up large scale, put his own name under it and become famous? - Hannes Schmid soon found out about Richard Prince and decided to have a look in his own archives to see if there was more to be found that could be acknowledged by the art world. And there were, for example, some 70,000 pictures of rockstars that he took between 1977 and 1984, while he was living with them on tour or during their holidays. Hannes Schmid was with the stars when they were cooking, preparing for the show or learning to ski in the Swiss Alps. His photos give backstage insight into the world of rock and pop that, even with its glamorous attitude, was still down to earth and somehow innocent.

The time to show a selection of these pictures could not be better, as the 1980s are currently rediscovered as a kind of golden age before the digital revolution, with a society in between materialist saturation and mass media innocence. There was no Starsearch or Britain’s Got Talent on television, but at the same time there was Boney M. as the first example of faked popstars, artificially and strategically put together to star as a pleasant surface for songs performed by others. Schmid’s photos always show authentic people; they may be superstars, but even if they strike the pose, they still do it like we all do when somebody wants to take a picture of us. The show at Gallery von Senger combines band portraits, among them Kraftwerk, Status Quo and Depeche Mode, a beautiful accumulation of several hundred photographs and the presentation of the book Rockstars, published by Edition Patrick Frey. A selection from Hannes Schmid’s Rockstars will also be part of the show “Who Shot Rock & Roll” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York until January 31, 2010.

Oliver Kielmayer? is the Director of Kunsthalle Winterthur?, Winterthur.