Valerie Schmidt is interested in the moment when an image becomes more than the representation of an event. In her artistic practice, she explores the relationship between body, image and action, approaching photography as a medium that does not merely document reality but actively produces it. Her work often begins with staged or performative situations in which control and chance, intuition and choreography, documentation and construction continuously intersect.
At the centre of her practice is the body as a carrier of physical and psychological affect. She examines facial expression, gesture, posture and movement as forms of visual language, asking how emotions become legible, where their clarity dissolves, and how photographic images evoke empathy, projection and memory. Her interest extends to historical image regimes as well as to the archaeological traces images leave within collective memory. Her works operate as open experimental setups in which perception, interpretation and the position of the viewer itself become part of the investigation.
Valerie Schmidt studied Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen and at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Since 2022 she has been Professor of Transmedial Photographic Narration and Image Design at Trier University of Applied Sciences. She lives and works between Trier and Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of Deutsche Bank Frankfurt, Museum Folkwang Essen, the Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, and the Birthrites Collection Manchester.
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