Best known as the photographer for the 1990s "Marlboro Man" (as appropriated by Richard Prince), Hannes Schmid (born 1946) has been active for decades in various genres of photography--principally fashion, rock and documentary. Early on in his career, Schmid blurred the boundaries between commissioned projects and personal work, and by the 1970s, was focused simultaneously on documenting cannibal folk culture in Indonesia and making classic portraits of bands such as Kraftwerk, Queen, Blondie, Depeche Mode and AC/DC. The latter body of work, done between 1978 and 1984, effectively tells the story of rock music between these years; Schmid spent the best part of a decade on tour with over 250 bands. Soon after, he entered the worlds of fashion and advertising photography, producing his famous icon--the Marlboro cowboy--in 1993, a figure that reached mass audiences and later percolated up to the contemporary art scene thanks to its adoption by Richard Prince, in the artist's later series of Marlboro appropriations. In addition to his photographic projects, Schmid's work also comprises films and installation projects. "Real Stories" is published to coincide with a retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern, and includes a large selection of Schmid's photographic works--400 of which are reproduced in color--along with essays that contextualize his work and address his position as an artist working inside photography.

The Kunstmuseum Bern owns one of the most important art collections in Switzerland. Since the foundation of the Staatliche Kunstsammlung in Bern in 1809 and the opening of the first museum building in 1879 the collection has grown continuously and has attained world renown. Over 170 masterpieces of the collection are assembled in a single publication for the first time and made accessible to a broad public through new art-historical analyses and numerous colour illustrations. The Kunstmuseum Bern houses prestigious works of Swiss and international art from the late thirteenth century until the present day. The collection contains over 3,000 paintings and sculptures and 48,000 works on paper and videos, including, for example, masterpieces by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Paul Cézanne, Salvador Dalí, Ferdinand Hodler, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso and Felix Vallotton. The works assembled in this volume are presented with full-page illustrations and are re-examined by some 70 international authors. A historical survey describing the development of the museum and its collection opens and introduces the publication.