Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
For his massive 2016 monograph, The Athens Recorder, published by Roma Publications, Schwartz embedded himself in the streets of Athens during the fall of 2015 to observe how residents, travelers, and strangers interact with an urban environment caught between cultural heritage and contemporary commercial consumption. Spanning over 500 pages and divided into seventeen chance-driven chapters, the monumental work transforms public squares, ruins, and shops into a comprehensive, geometric typography of public life.
Tiergarten is a distinctive artist's photo book that investigates the visual and conceptual line between wildness and captivity.
The project explores what zookeepers feed wild animals kept in human care at the Moscow Zoo. Schwartz photographed various animal rations, slabs of raw meat, heaps of vegetables, fish, and chunks of bread, framing these meals not as standard zoological documentation, but as striking, visceral still lives. Although these ingredients overlap with the human diet, their presentation and scale evoke something far more primal and alien.
Beyond its subject matter, the book stands out for its unique production process and tactile format. Designed in collaboration with Experimental Jetset and printed using a Risograph press, Schwartz used unconventional color separations and dithering to treat the printing technique almost like painting. The resulting shifting registrations, vibrant ink bleeds, and rich textures transform the images into near-abstract compositions that blur the boundary between document, printmaking, and abstract art. Issued in a limited, signed, and numbered edition of 250 copies, the spiral-bound volume housed in a custom slipcase is as much an art object as a photographic collection.
Johannes Schwartz, German, b. 1970.
Schwartz sis an award-winning contemporary German photographer whose analytical, highly structured practice investigates the conventions of photographic reproduction, urban space, and architectural forms. Born in Munich in 1970, Schwartz relocated to the Netherlands to study photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam between 1995 and 1998. He deeply integrated himself into the institution's pedagogical legacy, serving as the head of its photography department from 2004 to 2010, where he continues to teach and mentor emerging artists.
His photographic methodology focuses heavily on the medium as an autonomous tool for organizing and reordering visual knowledge rather than merely indexing reality. This formalist and conceptual curiosity is exemplified by his long-running High Series, an ongoing succession of site-specific publication collaborations initiated in 2003 with the renowned Amsterdam graphic design studio Experimental Jetset. Rather than serving as traditional exhibition catalogs that replicate gallery walls, these publications function as physical, dimensional extensions of his exhibitions, experimenting with various folds, binding styles, and printing techniques to explore how photography alters when mechanically reproduced.
Schwartz's documentary gaze often captures cities, landscapes, and interior architecture under precise, objective conditions. For his massive 2016 monograph, The Athens Recorder, published by Roma Publications, Schwartz embedded himself in the streets of Athens during the fall of 2015 to observe how residents, travelers, and strangers interact with an urban environment caught between cultural heritage and contemporary commercial consumption. Spanning over 500 pages and divided into seventeen chance-driven chapters, the monumental work transforms public squares, ruins, and shops into a comprehensive, geometric typography of public life.
Throughout his career, Schwartz has received significant critical acclaim, including the Esther Kroon Award in 1998 and the Cobra Kunstprijs Amstelveen in 2007. In 2011, he was selected as one of the featured artists representing the Netherlands in the group exhibition Opera Aperta / Loose Work at the official Dutch Pavilion during the 54th Venice Biennale. His prints and photobooks are collected and exhibited internationally, celebrated for their rigorous contribution to the intersection of photography, architecture, and graphic design.
