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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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.



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.








installation view, graduation show, Folkwang university Essen Werden, 2009

“The darkroom is myself,” Jochen Gerz called an essay devoted to the technical conditions of photography. The darkroom in Valerie Schmidt’s series de lira is likewise the human being: conceived as a diploma project on the subject of hysteria, the series operates at the limits of the visibility of psychological and emotional states. Hysteria, as a socially and politically opportune disease model, as a prime example of a pathologised construction of disparate manifestations, was described by Didi-Huberman in Invention of Hysteria as “an extraordinary abundance of symptoms, but these symptoms refer to nothing.”



The illness, with its two referents, the symptom and its antonym, healing medicine or treatment respectively, dissolves when one of the elements is absent. As a pictorial expression of this paradox of description and attribution, the space in Schmidt’s photographs can be understood: as a symptom that refers to nothing, the isolation of the emotional state of exception is a recurring stylistic device in the photographs: the space knows no counterpart, no addressee to whom the gestures of externalisation could be directed; it offers no support, most of the time not even a frame for emotional instability. The white wall offers no resistance to the rhetoric of the psyche, but rather contours it, deriving gestures and poses from it, whose naming fixes them as symptoms.



That the apparatus-based provenance of the image also reflects the forms of inscription and fixation on a material level can be regarded as the medial twist of a series that revolves around the ambiguity of psychological forms of expression: the anthropological self-evidence of the empathetic viewer, of being able to read faces, is called into question here: Who is capable of assigning the open mouths, rolling eyes and paralysed facial features to an emotional state? Can it be said whether the red-haired woman at the window is laughing or crying? The translation of the most momentary of all image media stutters when confronted with processes and occurrences whose psychological origin can be contained neither in word nor in image. Hysteria, too, as can be said from the perspective of medical history, is above all the deceptive success of a recording medium.

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Dr. Anja Schürmann




installation view, CAR, Zollverein, Essen, 2010contemporary art ruhr, 2010