Seminars

Since 2024, the Michael Schmidt Archive has been on permanent loan to the Photographic Collection of the Museum Folkwang. It preserves and provides access to an extensive body of works and documents relating to the life and career of the influential photographic artist Michael Schmidt (1945–2014). How does an archive come into being? How do its particular systems of order—and disorder—develop? And, perhaps most importantly: from what point does one begin to approach such a vast archive, and how does one find precisely what one was never looking for?

The seminar begins with one possible answer to this last question: every point of entry into an archive offers the opportunity for discovery and the development of new interests. The archive is a working memory: random access memory. Over the course of the seminar, participants will engage with aspects of Michael Schmidt's photographic practice, develop practical skills for working with archival materials, and critically examine the institutions of the museum and the archive.

Summer term 2026
Lecturer: Matthias Gründig (Museum Folkwang)

Photographs are composed of a combination of materials and layers that can deteriorate, warp, or break, thereby significantly affecting the preservation of the image. For this reason, photographic restauration and conservation focuses on the material components of photographs. Examining their physical properties is essential to understanding how photographers have worked, which materials they used, and how they processed their works.

Drawing on systematic identification methods, optical magnification, and examples from historical collections, the seminar addresses the classification of photographic processes from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. During the course, students analyze the physical and chemical properties of photographs and learn about their mechanisms of deterioration. In addition, an understanding of the material structure and production of early photographic processes is developed through hands-on practice, including the creation of albumen prints, cyanotypes, and salt prints.

Ongoing, summer and winter term
Lecturers: Peter Konarzewski, Heike Koenitz (Museum Folkwang)

The seminar focuses on the remarkable holdings of historical photo albums preserved in the Krupp Historical Archive. These materials are characterized by a high level of material quality while largely eluding mass forms of photography (in contrast, for example, to the photobook). In both content and design, they reveal a tension between individuality and standardization. A short history of the photo album thus engages with an object that presents a wide range of methodological challenges.

Even a cursory survey, and all the more so a thorough investigation, shows that this material opens up a broad spectrum of questions in cultural and visual history, including issues of authorship, the materiality of the photographic, the role of public and private spheres, aspects of gender and social class, the interplay between heteronomy and autonomy in design, and, not least, questions of representation and circulation.

Winter term 2022/2023
Lecturers: Manuela Fellner-Feldhaus (Krupp Historical Archive), Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts)