Valerie Schmidt is an artist, photographer and professor based in Germany. Her practice explores the body as a site of physical and psychological affect, working at the intersection of photography, performance and visual theory. Through staged and performative situations, she examines gesture, movement and bodily expression, questioning the legibility of body language and the relationship between conscious and unconscious action. Her work approaches photography as an experimental process of constructing images and exploring emotional thresholds, perception and empathy.
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Claus stolpert
Claus stolpert (Claus stumbles) is a 34-part photographic series exploring stumbling as a fragile form of being in the present. A man wearing a beige coat moves through an urban environment in a state of stumbling. His origin and destination remain unclear; the figure becomes a projection surface between everyday life, deviation, and staged performance.
The photographs emerge from a direct encounter with light, architecture, and bodily movement in public space. Under harsh sunlight and with a short exposure time, the camera captures fractions of a second in which balance begins to collapse: steps cross, the body slips out of alignment, and the coat lifts into the air. As a performative work, the series moves between contemporary dance and photographic slapstick. The strict geometry of the urban environment intensifies the awkward yet almost tragic poses of the figure. Hair, coat, and shadow appear to develop a life of their own.
At the center of the work lies the fleeting state of suspension between balance and collapse. The photographs do not depict a completed action, but rather the temporary emergence of a body in the moment of almost falling. The focus is on the frozen instant between control and chaos, a “blink of an eye” in which the body continually renegotiates its relationship to space.
Stumbling does not appear as failure, but as a conscious attitude: a gesture of vulnerability and a quiet resistance to the performance of urban sovereignty and the demand for perfect control. Through the deviation from linear movement, another form of presence emerges, open, unpredictable, and precarious.
Claus stolpert / Claus stumbles
Possible books, 2026
The artist’s book comprises 88 pages and is structured into two image sections. Between them is a separate text booklet that, when the book is opened, literally stumbles out of the body of the book, formally echoing the precarious balance of the photographic series. The publication includes texts by Dr. Anja Schürmann and Prof. Dr. Gerald Schröder, as well as a mockumentary-style interview with the fictional persona Claus, written by Valerie Schmidt.
It was designed by Matthias Hübner and published with Possible Books, Berlin, 2026.
Claus stolpert slide projection, Kulturpark Stolpe, 2022
Schemen uns ähnlicher Wesen
und ihr ungeordnetes Pläsier
(Shadows of Beings Like Us and Their Disordered Pleasure) brings together photographic works that emerge from an open-ended process between research, performative experimentation, and material exploration. At its centre is the question of the conditions under which bodies and things become visible—or withdraw from visibility. The photographs focus on fleeting states in which materials, bodies, and objects develop a peculiar presence for a brief moment; appearances that move between figuration and abstraction, familiarity and estrangement.
artist book
self published, 2022
edition of 250 copies
The title of the series is taken from Charlotte Warsen’s poetry collection Plage. As in her text, we encounter beings that appear similar to us and yet remain inaccessible: “Distorted by their own moods and gestures / their ways of living remain entirely hidden from us.” The photographs follow this poetic logic. Fabrics, paper, liquids, and everyday materials seem to produce faces, postures, or bodies without ever becoming unequivocally human. They oscillate between the animate and the inanimate, between projection and an agency of their own.
The camera captures not so much objects as moments of becoming and disappearing. The images do not show what is, but what occurs for a brief moment. In this sense, the series connects to Georges Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the image as a site of apparition: the visible remains open-ended, always pointing towards something that simultaneously withdraws from view. The photographic forms encounter us like symptoms or shadows: they evoke memories, affects, and bodily associations without ever allowing themselves to be fully deciphered.
The series continues Valerie Schmidt’s longstanding engagement with corporeality, affect, and the politics of the image. While earlier works examined historical gestures of loss of control, the focus here shifts towards the unruly materiality of bodies and things. Photography appears as a medium that does not fix fragile forms, but allows them to become visible in the moment of their appearance—as shadows of beings like us, whose ways of living remain hidden from us.
Case Studies in Falling
The work explores the moment of tipping as a photographic and performative event. It originated during a residency in Istanbul, where participants were asked to let themselves fall from a standing position onto a mattress in a controlled manner, while simultaneously resisting the instinct to break the fall. The resulting photographs form the starting point for an ongoing investigation into bodily states of transition.
photo series comprising seven diptychs
Inkjet prints on Hahnemühle photo rag,
420 × 594 mm, framed.
The focus is not on the fall itself, but on the moment when balance is exceeded. In this brief interval between stability and collapse, the body loses its familiar order without fully surrendering to the fall. Photography makes this fleeting state of suspension visible, transforming movement into a temporary form.
The individual photographs are composed into diptychs in which originally independent bodily postures enter into relation with one another. The image pairs create moments of mirroring, confrontation and rhythmic correspondence. The bodies seem to move towards one another, avoid each other, or be on the verge of colliding. This creates a tension between individual movement and collective choreography.
The body appears here as a temporary sculpture, taking form through a conscious act of letting go somewhere between balance and loss of control. While individual parts of the body still seem to find support on the ground, others dissolve into a slight motion blur. What becomes visible is a state in which the laws of physics, performative action and the photographic moment intersect.
The work also plays with the possibilities and limitations of photographic representation: while the head and feet appear to be frozen in the image, the body simultaneously dissolves into motion blur, creating a state of suspension between stillness and movement.
Blue Anima
Blue Anima is a series of twelve photographs of blue sheets of paper thrown into the air and captured against the light. Arranged as a tableau, the images form an ephemeral, fragmented figure suspended between body and abstraction.
The title refers to Jung’s concept of the anima, broadly understood as the feminine aspect of the male psyche and as an unconscious inner figure or archetype mediating between the conscious and unconscious. “Blue Anima” is not a fixed psychological term, but an artistic construction that combines this idea of an elusive inner figure with the symbolic associations of blue, a melancholy, introspection, spirituality, distance and the immaterial. The fleeting paper becomes a kind of temporary psychic image: unstable, weightless and caught between physical presence and imagination.
Also it was still just a sheet of paper thrown up in the air. I was bored, so I created little blue souls on one afternoon. I am not sure, if I believe in anything like the existence of a soul.
a series of 12 playful approaches to create a blue soul
Attitudes Passionelles
Created as a homage to Paul Richer’s Tableau synoptique de la “grande attaque hystérique complète et régulière” avec positions typiques et variantes from 1885, Attitudes Passionelles questions and satirises the notion of “documentation” in the staged representation of hysteria.
The “real” hysterical attacks were performed by selected female patients according to the instructions of Jean-Martin Charcot, the neurologist and leading researcher of hysteria at the Salpêtrière in Paris, and were subsequently photographically “documented.” Although the photographs were later modified into drawings for the clinical tableau, the tableau was nevertheless officially regarded as clinical evidence of the symptoms of a disease that no one was ever actually able to define.
While the various stages of a hysterical attack in the original tableau were represented by a young woman lying on a mattress, here the mattress itself becomes the hysterical subject, imitating the woman’s attacks.
Attitudes Passionelles,
Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2024
What particularly fascinated me when looking at photographs from the late nineteenth century was the striking fact that hysterical women seemed almost exclusively to experience their attacks on mattresses. The mattress was always a kind of counterpart beneath the actual patient. In Gaetano Rummo’s photographs in particular, which were themselves conceived as a homage to Charcot’s work, the mattress appears to take on a life of its own beneath the acrobatic movements of the woman in the striped leotard. It seems as though the mattress itself were imitating the hysterical attacks.
The different designations of the stages of the hysterical attack are taken almost verbatim from Paul Richer’s graphic tableau. The arrangement imitates the original while freely modifying it. Ultimately, this tableau, too, offers only an impression, rather than any insight into a more or less “true” progression of hysterical attacks. It is therefore no less true than the “original.”
Tableau, 120 × 150 cm, inkjet print on Hahnemühle, framed
seven-part sequence, each 60 × 80 cm, digital C-print, matte Diasec
Performance by Jeanne Procureur and Luisa Heilbron / BODHI PROJECT co-directed by Valerie Schmidt with her photographic work displayed in the background, Arch of Hysteria. Between Madness and Ecstasy exhibition at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2023
Affektgebilde (figures of affect)
Affektgebilde explores the limits of making psychological and emotional states visible. The photographs are staged constructions in which gestures, facial expressions and bodily postures become independent forms of imagery. Emotional states are deliberately isolated: the depicted spaces offer no social or situational context, no counterpart to whom the gestures might be addressed. Instead, the empty surroundings emphasise and frame the instability of the body.
The work focuses on the moment when expression and gesture become pose. The figures oscillate between face and mask, pleasure and suffering, excessive expression and collapse. An affective grimace can obscure the face like a mask, raising the question of whether the image reveals an inner state or merely its culturally recognisable form.
installation view of de lira
Würtembergischer Kunstverein, 2010
Drawing on the history of the visual representation of hysteria, Affektgebilde questions photography’s claim to make psychological states immediately legible. The camera captures and fixes gestures, but cannot fully reveal their psychological origin. The images therefore do not simply depict emotion; they expose the ambiguity of its visibility, making affect perceptible while leaving its meaning unresolved.
Choked by AI
Choked by AI examines how artificial intelligence reproduces, transforms and potentially amplifies historically embedded visual representations of gender and violence. The series began with the prompt: “a hypnotized woman falling into the arms of Jean-Martin Charcot’s assistant, photograph, 1890s.” The resulting square AI-generated image was subsequently expanded through outpainting, transforming the initial fragment into a larger scene.
From the generated material, ten images were selected in which the seemingly historical medical encounter had been transformed into scenes of physical violence: doctors attack, restrain or strangle female patients. The work raises questions about the relationship between historical imagery, machine learning and contemporary systems of visual censorship. What happens when an AI trained on vast archives of human-made images produces violent scenarios that were not explicitly requested? And who is responsible for recognising and evaluating the ethical implications of these images? Is it the machine, its training data, its developers, or the human viewer?
The series also questions of any supposed neutrality of AI image generation. The machine does not simply reproduce individual images but recombines visual patterns, cultural conventions and historical power structures. In doing so, it reveals how deeply representations of gender, authority and violence are embedded within the visual archive from which contemporary image-generation systems learn.
When asked why AI generates images in which doctors strangle women, ChatGPT responded that such images may result from “biased or inappropriate training data” and acknowledged the images as concerning and unacceptable. Three years later, the series was continued with the instruction: “Please create a contemporary version of this image.” The resulting images depict even more violent scenarios.
Choked by AI therefore operates as an ongoing experiment in machine vision, asking not only what AI can generate, but what its generated images reveal about the images, histories and social structures it has learned from.
10 inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 21 × 29.7 cm, edition of 5 (+ 2 AP)
Pointe
Stop-motion film, DVD, monitor, loop
The stop-motion film Pointe stages a single A4 sheet of paper as a precariously balanced body performing a choreography reminiscent of ballet en pointe. In its fragile upright position, the paper evokes the grace and lightness of a ballet dancer, while at the same time remaining constantly on the verge of tipping over or being carried away by the slightest external force. The inherent instability of the material thus becomes the central aesthetic element of the work.
Through the gradual rotation of the sheet around its own axis and the changing reflections of light from frame to frame, a shimmering, almost immaterial appearance emerges. This interplay of light and surface evokes associations with the dynamic light performances of dancer Loïe Fuller, whose work was likewise characterised by the transformation of the body through light.
The work condenses the paradoxical situation of a body maintaining its balance against its physical conditions, thereby revealing the fundamental impossibility of stable self-support. At the same time, Pointe reflects on the supposedly documentary character of the photographic image: by creating movement, balance and continuity solely through the montage of individual photographs, the film exposes the constructed and potentially deceptive nature of the medium.
Dompteuse De Papier
The photographic series Dompteuse de Papier comprises eight photographs of an A4 sheet of paper at the moment of landing, exploring its fleeting transformation into form somewhere between control and chance. In an experimental setting, a blank sheet is repeatedly released and captured in brief, barely reproducible poses.
In the transition between falling and landing, the paper appears as a temporary sculpture whose form exists only in the moment of its emergence. A hand intervenes in a guiding gesture, evoking the apparatus of a puppet theatre. At the same time, it becomes a visible gesture of the artist’s hand—not a neutral intervention, but a performative act that marks authorship and exposes the process of shaping the image. Under this direction, the sheet performs a movement reminiscent of ballet en pointe: seven attempts fail, and only once does a stable pose succeed.
The repeated attempt addresses a central aspect of photographic practice: the search for the “decisive moment” as an ideal point at which time, form and meaning converge. The series, however, undermines this logic by presenting the decisive moment not as a singular, given instant, but as the result of a sequence of approximations, repetitions and failed attempts. What appears decisive is not a moment of isolated evidence, but the constructed outcome of an experimental setup.
At the same time, the perception of the material shifts. In the photographic fixation, the fragile and fleeting sheet of paper appears as a comparatively cumbersome body. The series thus makes visible the difference between event and image.
The focus is not on success, but on the repetition of failure. The “perfect” moment remains the exception and becomes stable only through the image.
Only by chance did one image capture the perfect en pointe position.
a series of 7 images plus 1 single image
Deleting Babiński
Valerie Schmidt’s Deleting Babiński can be understood as an intervention into the visual dispositif that Georges Didi-Huberman describes in Invention de l’hystérie as the construction of a tableau clinique: an orchestrated arrangement in which the female body is not simply observed, but transformed through the mechanisms of looking into a symptôme visuel. André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887) serves as a paradigmatic document of this dispositif. It reveals Charcot’s theatrical production of truth, his staging of hysteria as an image that does not merely diagnose, but is performatively produced. The patient Blanche (Marie Wittman) appears as the embodiment of a ressemblance—not of an individual experience of suffering, but of an aesthetically and medically produced visual formula. The moment of fainting—that instant of “withdrawal” and theatrical surrender into the arms of the male physician—is simultaneously an act of image production and an act of power.
Schmidt’s eight-part photographic series dismantles this historicised visual constellation by isolating the falling female figure and transforming it into a sculptural bodily form. The moment of transition into unconsciousness—or rather, the moment in which this transition is performatively enacted—is frozen through the photographic interruption of movement. The poses appear rigid, yet emerge from a highly dynamic sequence; they oscillate between loss of control and a choreographed gesture of collapse. In doing so, the work points to the historical visual practices surrounding hysteria, which systematically constructed the female subject as an aesthetically rendered bearer of symptoms: a body exposed to the scrutinising and investigating gaze.
The medical invention, aestheticisation, and popularisation of hysteria in the nineteenth century produced a symptomatic iconography in which women were represented almost exclusively as suffering, unconscious, or vulnerable beings—always framed by male authority, expertise, and control. This visual tradition not only reinforced clinical power relations, but also functioned as a cultural template that associated femininity with vulnerability, excess, and irrationality.
Schmidt’s work subverts this structure by removing the male support from the image and thereby destabilising the epistemic foundation of the historical representation. In her fall, the protagonist now holds herself; the once-functional male hands remain only as obscure, almost decorative residues, no longer able either to protect or to control. The established iconography of the fainting gesture thus shifts: it becomes a paradoxical pose of autonomous imbalance, a form of self-assertion in the very moment of presumed loss of control.
Deleting Babiński is therefore not merely a critical rereading, but an epistemic counter-figure to Brouillet’s tableau clinique. The series transforms the iconographic tradition of hysteria from a space of male authorisation into a site of visual instability and the production of knowledge. It demonstrates that the hysterical image—the image of the apparently involuntary body sinking towards the ground—is not closed or complete, but remains open to new montages, new meanings, and new Pathosformeln.
In this sense, Schmidt works very much in the spirit of Didi-Huberman: she does not allow the historical image to rest, but makes it tremble.
Dr. Kerstin Stremmel
installation view
Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, 2024
Augustine II
Augustine II continues the exploration of the historical construction of hysteria through images, first developed in Attitudes Passionelles and Deleting Babiński. The work returns to the figure of Augustine, one of the best-known patients of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. In the nineteenth century, her body was shaped into a particular image of illness and femininity through medical observation, photographic staging and public display.
The animation depicts a fainting body in an empty space. A female-presenting body falls in an endless loop, without an audience, without a performance and without the male figure traditionally positioned to catch or hold it. The historical gesture of hysteria is removed from its original context and reappears as an artificially generated movement between bodily memory, simulation and digital reconstruction.
The low-angle perspective, as if the body were suspended above the viewer on a sheet of glass, refers both to historical photographic experiments involving symptomatic falling and to contemporary post-photographic image spaces. The animation releases the body from the expected fixity of the photographic image and transfers it into a digital in-between state, where image, movement and construction become inseparably intertwined. The body no longer appears as an object subjected to a controlling gaze, but as an unstable image figure suspended between archive, simulation and artificially generated presence.
Bodies That Obey
Bodies That Obey (in progress) investigates hypnosis as a state between consciousness and the unconscious, focusing on the relationship between bodily response, mental imagery and photographic representation. The series asks how invisible psychological processes and inner images might be translated into visual form, while examining the particular aesthetics of bodies under hypnosis—between conscious action, involuntary reaction, control and surrender.
The work combines photographic observations of hypnosis sessions with staged images, body studies, still lifes and visual research into the spaces, objects and techniques surrounding hypnosis. Particular attention is given to gestures, facial expressions and postures, as well as to the choreographic relationship between hypnotist and subject. Photographic sequences make these subtle shifts in movement and control visible, while subjective accounts of hypnotised people open up a perspective on the inner images and perceptual states that remain inaccessible to direct observation.
Fernand Panajou
Leçons cliniques sur l'hystérie et l'hypnotisme faites à l'Hôpital Saint-André de Bordeaux. d'une Lettre-Préface de M. Le Professeur J.-M. CharlotPitres, AlbertVerlag: Ocatve Doin, Paris, 1891
The project also draws on the history of hypnotic imagery, particularly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic practices in which scientific observation, performance and image-making became closely intertwined. Historical sources and photographic experiments by figures such as L. Löwenfeld and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing serve as points of reference for questioning how hypnotic states have been visually constructed and interpreted.
Bodies That Obey understands hypnosis not only
as a psychological condition but as a visual and performative event. Photography becomes a means of negotiating the unstable boundary between inner and outer experience, conscious intention and bodily autonomy, and documentation and construction.
One Glass Away From Almost Flying
One Glass Away (from almost flying) plays with the fragile moment between staying grounded and taking off. The work is conceived as a diptych and developed from a performance created specifically for the photographic images: trying to learn how to fly with nothing but a body, a small glass and a little optimism.
The body balances precariously on the glass as if it were a tiny launch pad. The gesture is both physical and metaphorical—a clumsy but determined attempt to leave the ground. The glass becomes a point of departure, but also a reminder of how little it takes to lose balance. One glass can be the difference between standing firmly, feeling weightless, or suddenly seeing the world from a slightly different angle.
The title refers to that strange space between sobriety and intoxication, between control and letting go. One Glass Away can mean being one glass away from losing your balance, but also one glass away from the feeling that perhaps, just for a moment, you might actually fly.
The photographs capture this attempt rather than its success. What remains is a playful and slightly absurd physical experiment: a body testing gravity, balance and its own limits, caught somewhere between falling, flying and almost making it.
sometimes, it is a cat that is falling..
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