The curator

Brain, eyes, hands and ears.

Hi, my name is Valentin Schmid. 38 years old, father of one, car enthusiast since 4, based in Switzerland. Every volume in this archive was thought of, created and curated with my brain, eyes, hands and ears.

Cars came before everything else. At four I asked my mother why this car had four exhaust pipes. She couldn't tell me. I owned the whole GT1 grid in miniature: the 911 GT1, the F1 GTR, the CLK GTR, all of them as Tamiya RCs. Motor racing never let go. I have watched every Formula 1 race since I was six, and DTM, rally and endurance racing have their place in my heart as well.

I bought my first car at eighteen with hard-saved money. At thirty-eight I have owned more cars than pairs of pants. I trained as a mechatronics technician, and the degree matters here more than you think: every graft in these volumes is engineered before it is drawn. When a duct appears on a machine, it feeds something in my mind.

Photography almost became my profession. It stayed the eye instead. Composition, light and restraint decide what enters the archive, and most images never make it past the desk.

Then twenty years inside the automotive industry. That time teaches you two lists: what gets built, and what never does. The second list is where this archive lives.

The tools are new, the discipline is old. I build systems that let me run a weekly archive alone: research, build, photography, film, music, the site. Curation is the work. The machines deserve files, and somebody has to keep them.

Why the archive exists The manifesto →