Book
Marian Schmidt had not finished his book on a phenomenology of the image before he passed away. The book has yet to be published. Arthur Schmidt, Marian Schmidt’s son, is in the process of gathering all of the notes and materials his father left behind in order to complete the book’s unfinished or missing chapters.
In his book Marian ties together the worlds of science, spirituality and all existing artistic fields.
“It’s a matter of research. There is research on the way for instance how sounds act on our consciousness.
You can tell how people react watching a film. But how do people react seeing a photograph? How do people look at the photograph? And what is the phenomenology of the whole thing? That has to be analyzed. Because we don’t know too much about it.”
One of the purposes of Marian’s book on a phenomenology of the image is to perfect the author’s pedagogical method in photography. This method can also be applied to any other artistic field.
"The best way of learning is by asking oneself meaningful questions and trying to discover independently their solution. There is only one optimal way of learning: to question what you learn from others and to discover and experience by yourself. It concerns every field of knowledge, whether in the sciences or humanities, and also every form of personal creation."
Schmidt taught a method of learning to both create and perceive images, but also to develop as a human being.
Schmidt’s approach/methodology was inspired by his studies in mathematics, by Krishnamurti’s values which are the same as his (and which he encountered in his school in Brockwood Park), and by Celibidache’s seminars:
A search for an inner spiritual truth in one’s work, learning by discovery, by asking the right questions and trying independently to find answers to them avoiding imitations, dogmatisms and authorities, learning by one’s own living experiences, treating concepts as unverified hypothesis and learning to be a free spirit independent of trends.