PHotoEspaña 2010 Opens with an Exhibition by Collier Schorr

LISBON.- New York artist Collier Schorr offers an autobiographical view of the German landscape from which her family originates. A photographic imagination combining her roles as photographer, anthropologist and researcher to create a project which mixes documentary with fiction

Collier Schorr’s work is full of images of young and adolescent men. Her series portray wrestlers, men in the military uniform of Nazi Germany or the pre-Vietnam American Army. Her stance is always a classical composition where ambiguity, androgyny, identity and gender confusion are always present.

Collier Schorr, "Game Keeper", 2004. Courtesy: 303 Gallery, New York and Modern Art, London

However, the almost 60 photographs and 3 video on display at the Berardo Museum are part of the work she has competed in a village in southern Germany over the past twenty years. Schorr has created a photographic imaginarium which mixes documentary with fiction, where the German landscape is a map of her own story, both imagined and inherited. Combining the roles of photographer, anthropologist and researcher, she narrates the tales of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family. The photographs of landscapes and objects, dead nature and portraits reflect on themes such as history, individualism, identity and gender.

Collier Schorr (New York, 1963) studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work was included in the Whitney Museum Biennial in 2002 and the first International Center for Photography Triennial. It can also be found in collections at MoMA, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York, the San Francisco Art Museum and the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Italy.

Related posts:

1. Winner of 2009 PHotoEspaña Prize, Alejandra Laviada, Presents Her First Solo Exhibition
2. ICO Collections Museum Opens First Helen Levitt Anthological Exhibition in Spain
3. Exclusive Catherine Opie Exhibition Opens at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
4. Giuseppe Moccia Wins PHotoEspaña OjodePez Human Values Award
5. Major Exhibition of 1940s and ’50s’ Street Photography Opens in Milwaukee