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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Claus stolpert (Claus stumbles) is a 34-part photographic series exploring stumbling as a fragile form of being in the present. A man wearing a beige coat moves through an urban environment in a state of stumbling. His origin and destination remain unclear; the figure becomes a projection surface between everyday life, deviation, and staged performance.
The photographs emerge from a direct encounter with light, architecture, and bodily movement in public space. Under harsh sunlight and with a short exposure time, the camera captures fractions of a second in which balance begins to collapse: steps cross, the body slips out of alignment, and the coat lifts into the air. As a performative work, the series moves between contemporary dance and photographic slapstick. The strict geometry of the urban environment intensifies the awkward yet almost tragic poses of the figure. Hair, coat, and shadow appear to develop a life of their own.
At the center of the work lies the fleeting state of suspension between balance and collapse. The photographs do not depict a completed action, but rather the temporary emergence of a body in the moment of almost falling. The focus is on the frozen instant between control and chaos, a “blink of an eye” in which the body continually renegotiates its relationship to space.
Stumbling does not appear as failure, but as a conscious attitude: a gesture of vulnerability and a quiet resistance to the performance of urban sovereignty and the demand for perfect control. Through the deviation from linear movement, another form of presence emerges, open, unpredictable, and precarious.
installation view at Stolpe Kulturpark,
during X4H8+FM festival
installation at St. Pauls church, Trier
during Rheinland-Pfalz-Triennale
mockumentary style interview with the persona Claus
The artist’s book comprises 88 pages and is structured into two image sections. Between them is a separate text booklet that, when the book is opened, literally stumbles out of the body of the book, formally echoing the precarious balance of the photographic series. The publication includes texts by Dr. Anja Schürmann and Prof. Dr. Gerald Schröder, as well as a mockumentary-style interview with the fictional persona Claus, written by Valerie Schmidt.
It was designed by Matthias Hübner and published with Possible Books, Berlin, 2026.
installation, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart during the Fotosommer Stuttgart, 2026