He was born in Żyrardów in 1945 but his parents decided to emigrate. They first went to France in 1946 but after a short while moved to Caracas in Venezuela, where Schmidt took his first photographs as a twelve year-old boy with a Konica camera given to him by his father. After passing the baccalaureate he found his way to the United States. When asked by Marek Grygiel, Schmidt explained:
My father sent me to Berkeley at the University of California to study engineering. It was a hard time for me as I didn't know English. Anyway, I didn't like engineering and I wanted to go to film school in Los Angeles, but my father didn't want to finance this idea hence I decided to study mathematics.
Schmidt defended his PhD in mathematics at Brandeis University and lectured there till the second half of the 1970s. The academic job was an outcome of the fact that he was not able to subsist on photography alone. The year 1973 was a turning point in his artistic life – two of his pictures were selected by Andre Kertesz for the yearly American Society of Magazine Photographers exhibition. These two pictures were: Śpiąca Kobieta (editor’s translation: A Sleeping Woman) and Trzej Więźniowie (editor’s translation: Three Inmates), both taken in Mexico.
He returned to Poland in 1974 and in the next year received a job offer as second director in the Kadr crew. Schmidt worked with Jerzy Kawalerowicz on Death of a President (1977), shot advertising photographs for Pollena, created covers for Zwierciadło, and wrote numerous reportages for itd. In 1978 Schmidt left Poland and moved to New York, where he managed to get a job in the prestigious Black Star agency, whose future members would be photographers like Robert Capa, William Eugene Smith, Martin Munkácsi, Bill Brandt, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The photographer looks back on the time:
I was given an extraordinary job to take photographs in Saudi Arabia. In Rihjad, I was on the one hand shooting a documentary film for the university, while on the other taking photographs of American industrial companies in the Persian Gulf region.
Schmidt tried to take reportage photographs on the streets of Arabic cities but the local populace was reluctant to it (images of people and animals are against the orthodox Islam practised on the Arabian Peninsula). From a commercial point of view, it was the ‘photographer’s dream’ though. Thanks to the money raised on photographs taken in Saudi Arabia, he could settle with his wife in Paris, where he lived between 1980 and the second half of the 1990s.
In France he got involved with the Rapho agency which was (like Black Star in the United States), exemplary of the best press photography. While working there, he met some of the most important figures of the humanistic line of reportage photography: Robert Doisneau, Edouardo Boubata, and Willy Ronis. Schmidt recollects:
There was a custom that somewhere between 4 and 5pm photographers gathered at tea time. Doisneau was the most frequent visitor […]. He enjoyed joking. He was, if one can say that, an anti-intellectualist. He did not like to philosophise, but loved daily, routine matters. I think there's something that connects the Poles and the French mentally. It's the so-called ‘l’esprit’, the witty situational esprit. When something funny happens, there's always someone who comes up with a joke.
The time spent in France and the humanistic photography period were symbolically brought to an end with an exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary History in Paris in 1994, where around one hundred photographs by the artist were shown. An introduction to the album accompanying the exhibition was written by Edouard Boubat.