With this book, Joachim Schmid is following in the footsteps of Walker Evans’s American Photographs, a milestone for the photobook genre, created on the occasion of his exhibition—the first solo exhibition ever for a photographer—at MoMA New York in 1938. Both artists share an interest in the everyday: views of streets, stores, writing in urban space, commercial culture, housing, and people dominate. Unlike Evans, however, the photographic material in this book does not come from Schmid himself, but—as is so often the case in his oeuvre, which is committed to the motto “No new photos until the old ones are used up”—from countless photo sharing websites, where he used the captions of Evans’s original photos as search terms. Thus, his “new edition of American Photographs offers a modern equivalent of Evans’ masterpiece, compiled entirely of found photographs and created with the help of a search engine instead of a camera” (Joachim Schmid, “American Photographs,” website).

In layout and arrangement, Schmid follows the original. Even the paratext has hardly changed: Schmid replaced the dedication of “J. S. N.” with “J. S.,” which happen to be his own initials; and he has updated the disclaimer, reserving the copyright for this book himself, especially the arrangement of photographs, while the right to reproduce individual images remains with the photographers who uploaded them. A list of the photos and year taken concludes the book, merging their titles with Evans’s original captions (including the 1938 printing error corrections) from Schmid’s search queries, as here: “24 (Sidewalk in) Vicksburg, Pennsylvania Mississippi, 2007,” with “Pennsylvania” crossed out to show that it has been replaced with “Mississippi.”