Collier Schorr

Mach die Wunde Sauber (Study 1)
16 black-and-white and colour xeroxes, each approx. 28 × 41 cm, 2007

The New York photo artist Collier Schorr, who is the daughter of an American soldier, was raised in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. Since childhood she regularly spends her summers there; Schwäbisch Gmünd is also the place where she started taking pictures and began her Germany photographic series that she continues to work on.

Schorr follows the people she portrays over a period of several years, focusing on her own relationship as a Jewish artist to “Germany, the German landscape, the German citizen, the German soldier” (1) and the relationship of German people to their history.

The young men in her photographs look childish and fragile in their SS or Wehrmacht uniforms which were hired from a costume agency. Although the images are in glamorous black and white – and look almost like historical photos – they nevertheless remain definitely contemporary. Whether the pose is that of a provokingly relaxed teenager with a serious expression, or whether the model is naked, Schorr’s subjects pose as modern people that are completely different to their grandfathers, whose dashing manner and pathos from back then looks passé and contrived nowadays. The artist subtly underlines the vulnerability of her models with irritating nuances of aggressiveness, virility, and innocence, and presents them as an intimate reflection on the shifting boundaries of past and present. Schorr looks beyond the clothing that has such negative historical associations and offers an undistorted view of young, male corporeality and the motif of innocence against the background of history.

With her aestheticised photos, Collier Schorr interrogates the limits of taboos, and connects German patriotism and nationalism with the darkest chapter of German history – World War II. In this way she confronts contradictory historic myths and symbols of masculinity with suppressed, reactivated memories.

Angela Rosenberg

(1) Quotation by Collier Schorr from an interview with Michael Wang for the Harvard Photography Journal, vol.9, 2003

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