Arno Schmidt, a giant of German literature, was also a prolific photographer. The bulk of his thousands of photographs focus on his close surroundings, his house and the nearby forest where he often walked; they reflect a keen eye and a razor-sharp sense of composition. They also act as an extension of his writings. The photographs capture the landscapes that are the settings for his novels – the flat heathlands changing with the seasons where fauns and amateur surveyors roam along endless barbed-wire fencing. The painstaking record of atmospheric details also feeds into the vast repertoire of metaphors that he carefully compiled in his study, his photographs overlapping with his notes. Each frozen image echoes his literary style, juxtaposing short paragraphs without transition, often starting with a few words in italics as if to imprint them all the deeper in the reader’s mind. For Arno Schmidt, memories are like beads: “The thread of insignificance, of omnipresent boredom, is strung, like a pearl necklace, with tiny units of inward and outward experiences. From midnight to midnight is not at all a day, but 1440 minutes (and of those, fifty at most are worthy of interest!)” Each photograph is its own paragraph, a brief pause to study something that snags our minds or our senses.

Arno Schmidt was born in Hamburg in 1914 and died in Celle (Germany) in 1979. The exhibition has been organised with support from the Arno Schmidt Stiftung, Bargfeld.