Biography
Marian Schmidt was born in Poland in 1945. He spent his childhood in Venezuela.
At the age of 12, while studying at the Liceo de Aplicación in Caracas, he began to take photographs with his father’s rangefinder Konica and make documentary films with his Canon 8mm film camera. Inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman, he decided to become a film director and wanted to study filmmaking in Los Angeles. However, his father would not finance his plans and instead sent him in 1961 to the University of California, Berkeley to study engineering. His professors discovered he had a great talent for mathematics and a year later he transferred to the mathematics department where he obtained a B.A. with honours in 1965. He accepted a generous scholarship for Ph.D. studies in mathematics from Brandeis University in Waltham (Massachusetts).
In his first year at Brandeis he was lucky to meet the great mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. (“A Beautiful Mind”), whom he befriended and admired. During his studies, he returned to his adolescent passions and began photographing again. Artist Ben Shahn after viewing one of his first pictures encouraged him to continue photographing. Schmidt also made an experimental film with the recently acquired cinema equipment by the university. The summer of 1968 was a turning point in the life of Marian Schmidt. During a stay in California, he began reading the novels of Hermann Hesse and the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. He had an out-of-body experience and went through several peak experiences as described by psychologist Abraham Maslow. He became aware that he was much more attracted by a spiritual dimension than by intellectual creativity. He decided he would not become a mathematician, but rather a film director and photographer. He also realized that transcendence is the most important content in any creative work. Finishing his Ph.D. thesis became a must for him. He did not want to repeatedly question himself for the rest of his life on whether or not he could do it. Upon his return to Brandeis, he found out that Abraham Maslow, the head of the psychology department, had invited J. Krisnamurti for a series of lectures. Schmidt had the opportunity to meet and speak with Krishnamurti. The following year he completed his Ph.D. thesis and was offered a post-doctoral instructorship at Harvard University and a one year research position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. At the same time Krishnamurti invited him to stay with him at Brockwood Park in England and teach there. He accepted Krishnamurti’s invitation and resigned from a research and academic career in mathematics. He travelled to Brockwood at the beginning of June 1969 where he spent a month with Krishnamurti and joined him in Switzerland in July. It was one of his most imporant living experiences. Next he went to Rome where he spent a few months taking photographs.
Because of a misunderstanding with the administration of Brockwood Park, he resigned from his teaching position and found himself in Rome without any financial means. He was fortunate to meet Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome. Thanks to a recommendation of Antonioni, he obtained a job in New York City as assistant producer in the film “Steppenwolf” based on Hermann Hesse’s novel. After a few months, the producers run out of finances and Schmidt lost his job. He spent the next five years in New York City working as a photographer (e.g. Santana’s cover photograph for the album Abraxas), lighting director in an Off-Off-Broadway theater and teaching in colleges. He wrote and directed a fiction 30 minute film “The Daughter.” During the summers he travelled to Mexico and to several countries in Western Europe taking photographs. Two of his Mexican photographs were chosen by André Kertészfor an exhibition of young members of the American Society of Media Photographers.
During the summer of 1974 he visited for the first time his native Poland.
Besides travelling in the country taking photographs, he met in Warsaw and Cracow some of the leading Polish film ad theater directors: Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Krzysztof Zanussi, Jerzy Hoffman, Konrad Swinarski and Jerzy Jarocki. Kawalerowicz invited him to return to Poland and work as assistant director in his film unit “Kadr.” In 1975 he settled in Poland where he lived for three years. He worked as assistant director in three feature length films. The most important being Kawalerowicz’s “Death of a President” (Silver Bear at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival), where he was first assistant director. In between films, Schmidt travelled extensively in Poland photographing every day life and important social, cultural and religious events.
In 1976 he married actress Marta Dutkiewicz.
Schmidt went back to New York with his wife in 1978. Thanks to his photographs of Poland, he became a member of the photo agency “Black Star.”
From 1978 to 1980 he was employed by the University of Ryad in Saoudi Arabia to make several documentaries.
In 1980 he moved to Paris to work with the photo agency “Rapho” joining the great trio of humanist photographers: Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis. The Parisian period (1980-1997) was very fruitful for Schmidt: he had many prestigious exhibitions and publications, and perfected his artistry.
In 1982 Thanks to his contacts with French mathematicians began his project “Hommes de science: 28 portraits” culminating in the publication of a book and an itinerary exhibition of portraits shown in three countries.
In 1983 his son Arthur was born.
From 1983 to 1989 Schmidt photographed in France, Poland, Spain and Belgium.
In 1986 Schmidt began to study music (his childhood dream) and learning to play the traverse flute.
He also studied a Phenomenology of Music with Celibidache in Cluny and Paris from 1988 to 1990. Celibidache confirmed to him that music without the spiritual dimension is only a series of sound effects. Inspired by Celibidache, Schmidt created his own Phenomenology of the Image, which he started to teach.
In 1994 the Parisian Editions Cercle d’art published an album titled “Marian Schmidt” with 81 of his photographs and an introduction by Edouard Boubat.
In 1997, Schmidtand his wife decided to leave France and settle in Warsaw, Poland with their son, Arthur.Schmidt taught photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and in ZPAF (the Union of Polish Photographers) in Warsaw.
In 2000, he founded and began to direct the Warsaw School of Photography and Graphic Design where he taught expressive photography, phenomenology of the image and transcendence in art.
During the same year his third book “Unusual Conversations with Father Jan Twardowski”(an outstanding Polish poet),was published in Warsaw.
Schmidt also taught photography at the National Film School in Łódź, where in 2002 he obtained the degree of Habilitated Doctor in the field of Cinema and the specialty of Fine Art Photography.
Around 2009 he started writing a book on photography, which includes his phenomenology of the image.
In 2017, Schmidt co-published his fourth book in collaboration with the History Meeting House: “Inside Poland – Marian Schmidt Photographs”. The book was published alongside a photography exhibition of over a hundred of Schmidt’s photographs of Poland, which he began taking in 1974. This was Marian Schmidt’s last exhibition.
Marian Schmidt died in Krakow, on the 7th of March 2018 due to complications from heart surgery.