Through the use of arresting colors and subtle textures, Vivien Schmidt digitally develops and prints her photographs of the sea and the sky, the sun and the moon, doors and windows, urban architecture and rural landscapes, flora and fauna, and more. Some of these photos are real or hyper-real, as images that reflect what she sees through the camera’s lens. But they remain nonetheless somewhat ethereal, to correspond to the (e)scapes of our dreams. In other work, Schmidt engages in more post-photographic re-imaging, as akin to stripping away layers of old paint to uncover the masterpiece hidden beneath. By removing layers of the real landscape, she seeks to reveal artists’ depictions of places we recognize, even if we have never been there, so as to bring back the feelings and passions evoked by paintings and watercolors of the past using the most modern of mediums, digital photography, with the most modern of techniques, computer digital photo-enhancement software.
All of the photos are printed by the artist on Archival Matte paper and framed with acid-free mats and matboard. The photos were taken with either an Olympus OMD E-1 or a Canon 5D.
About the Work
Fine art color photography is an avocation for Vivien Schmidt. Born in New York City, she lived in Italy (Milan) from ages 8 to 16, studied in Paris in her early 20s, and now divides her time between Boston, Paris, and Menton. Her early work focused on doors and windows in decay, going from images of dusky pink wooden doors of colonial era houses in Dakar, Senegal to snowed-in, abandoned cape-style houses in New England. More recent work has centered on landscapes, seascapes, and monuments from the foggy hills of Tuscany to the fogged-in fjords of Norway; from the temples of Angkor Wat to the buttes of Monument Valley; and from the sunrises of the Riviera to the sunsets of Iceland.
Vivien Schmidt has exhibited widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Exhibitions in the 1990s of her color photography included shows in the United States throughout New England. With her shift to digital photography in the early 2000s, she moved from an emphasis on faithful reproduction to a more imaginative recreation of mood. Her digital ‘reimaginings’ of Tuscan landscapes were exhibited in the Museum of Viniculture in Montespertoli in 2007. She exhibited a wider range of images from Japan, Italy, and India for a solo exhibition at the New Art Center in New York City in 2009. Her solo exhibition in 2010 at the Galleria Mentana in Florence focused on imagined landscapes in different parts of Italy. In 2011 her solo exhibition at the NY Center for Photography and the Moving Image featured new work on mountain landscapes from the US Southwest, the Dolomites, and the Norwegian fjords. Her solo exhibition on Italy’s “Landscapes of History” at Harvard’s Center for European Studies in 2014 has been on permanent display at the Italian Consulate in Boston since 2015. More recent exhibitions include group shows at the Tornatora Gallery in Rome, the De Marchi Gallery in Bologna, the Galleria Mentana in Florence, the Primopiano Gallery in Lecce, and the Studio Vogue Gallery in Toronto. Her most recent solo exhibition was in Menton, France, in 2021. Her next exhibit will be in Gorbio, France, beginning in February 2022.
Vivien Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration in the Pardee School at Boston University and Honorary Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2018. For more on her academic career, see https://sites.bu.edu/vschmidt/
