The Country Life series invited artists to respond to the George Garland Collection, archived at the West Sussex County Records Office. Garland made thousands of photographs from his studio in Petworth of the rural England that he knew would soon disappear. The second commission in the series, Schmid combined portraits by George Garland with fragments of newspaper articles drawn from the West Sussex Records Office. Schmid’s work quietly resonates with the details of real lives and experiences, echoing the sense of place and a particular rural way of life. But, more broadly, the work dwells on the nature of history and memory and on how we understand the past through the partial narratives contained in and created by archives. Joachim Schmid was born in 1955. He lives and works in Berlin. Publications include Erste allgemeine Altfotosammlung (1991); Knipsen (1993); Art Addicts Anonymous (1993); Bilder von der Strasse (1994) and Kunst gegen Essen (1996) Visit Joachim Schmid's extraordinary website archive.   Click here for details of the accompanying publication Very Miscellaneous Funded by The Arts Council of England and South East Arts Board Touring dates: Work reshown at the Museum Fotografik, Antwerp, Holland, 1998 Tokyo Biennale, 1999 The Shoreditch Biennale, 1998