Valerie Schmidt  is an artist, photographer and professor based in Germany. Her practice explores the body as a site of physical and psychological affect, working at the intersection of photography, performance and visual theory. Through staged and performative situations, she examines gesture, movement and bodily expression, questioning the legibility of body language and the relationship between conscious and unconscious action. Her work approaches photography as an experimental process of constructing images and exploring emotional thresholds, perception and empathy.

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attitudes passionelles


Created as a homage to Paul Richer’s Tableau synoptique de la “grande attaque hystérique complète et régulière” avec positions typiques et variantes from 1885, Attitudes Passionelles questions and satirises the notion of “documentation” in the staged representation of hysteria.

The “real” hysterical attacks were performed by selected female patients according to the instructions of Jean-Martin Charcot, the neurologist and leading researcher of hysteria at the Salpêtrière in Paris, and were subsequently photographically “documented.” Although the photographs were later modified into drawings for the clinical tableau, the tableau was nevertheless officially regarded as clinical evidence of the symptoms of a disease that no one was ever actually able to define.

While the various stages of a hysterical attack in the original tableau were represented by a young woman lying on a mattress, here the mattress itself becomes the hysterical subject, imitating the woman’s attacks.



What particularly fascinated me when looking at photographs from the late nineteenth century was the striking fact that hysterical women seemed almost exclusively to experience their attacks on mattresses. The mattress was always a kind of counterpart beneath the actual patient. In Gaetano Rummo’s photographs in particular, which were themselves conceived as a homage to Charcot’s work, the mattress appears to take on a life of its own beneath the acrobatic movements of the woman in the striped leotard. It seems as though the mattress itself were imitating the hysterical attacks.

The different designations of the stages of the hysterical attack are taken almost verbatim from Paul Richer’s graphic tableau. The arrangement imitates the original while freely modifying it. Ultimately, this tableau, too, offers only an impression, rather than any insight into a more or less “true” progression of hysterical attacks. It is therefore no less true than the “original.”


documentation photography © Marcel Krajco, 2024
   

Tableau, 120 × 150 cm, inkjet print on Hahnemühle, framed





seven-part sequence, each 60 × 80 cm, digital C-print, matte Diasec



performance by Mai Ishiwata, Sammlung Falkenberg, Hamburg



performance by Mai Ishiwata, Sammlung Falkenberg, Hamburg

extract from the essay by Ania Ready published in Photomonitor
Homage to Hysterical Women

Contemporary Interpretations of the 19th Century Photographs of Hysterical Patients

 There is also another way of dealing with the uncomfortable contents of The Photographic Iconography. In her work entitled attitudes passionelles, a German artist Valerie Schmidt removed the subjects of the Salpêtrière photographs and replaced them with a mattress. She comments, What is particularly striking when looking at various photographs from the end of the nineteenth century is that hysterics could suffer a hysterical attack almost exclusively on mattresses. The mattress was always a kind of counterpart beneath the actual patient.

Schmidt’s work becomes a playful critique of the medical classification of hysteria. An object – the mattress – is moulded very skillfully to fit difficult positions, repeating the acrobatic movements of the patients. We are no longer faced with human suffering in these photographs but instead are presented with a tongue-in-cheek tableau. 

 Schmidt explained, I’ve always been interested in the performative aspect of photography. When working on ‘attitudes passionelles’, I felt that the outcome of my work with the mattress was no less true than the original tableau by Paul Richer [Richer was an artist employed by Dr Charcot to draw hysterical women before photography was brought in to the Salpêtrière]. In my work, the mattress became a hysteric. In this fascinating performance she directed, Schmidt explores the physicality of human interactions and the tension between being shaped into something and wanting to move freely. By adding the improbable partner – the mattress – the performance brings in the domestic and the medical into the bodily mix. Both its familiarity and its oddness echoes the paradoxical nature of hysteria. It’s significant that the dancers are female – like the photographed patients of The Photographic Iconography.

Schmidt’s work became a double act when she collaborated with two dancers Jeanne Procureur and Luisa Heilbron from the BODHI PROJECT who performed a dancing piece in which mattress was a protagonist. Schmidt added, In this collaboration, one actor forces the other to take a pose and then moves away, watches how she does it. This piece in which we wanted to maintain roughness of movement is very much about rape, aggression, directing or pushing women into presenting something fixed.