"A theme of twinship has always run through my work, of people that look alike. And that was another reason I was drawn to wrestling because I feel like wrestlers look a certain way. And I’ve grown to love that face. And so I’m looking for guys that fit that pattern. I’m looking for this tribe of people. Usually their ears get a little smaller as time goes by and the ridge starts to come out of their forehead. They start to get a bit more of a heavy brow. The nose is either pushed up or it’s pushed down. For me they’re really beautiful, but they’re definitely unusual looking. I remember that even about guys in my high school. The guys that wrestled looked different than the other guys. They weren’t the same kind of sports hero, but they were sportsmen."
"I like devastation. I like exhaustion. I really like seeing someone that I know can’t barely get up. The thing about a wrestling practice is, in a good school like Blair, the coach will get every last bit of energy out of you and then you’re just deflated. And there’s a peacefulness in that moment that I really love, to see someone who’s just used their entire body. For me it’s all performance, it’s all dance. Particularly wrestling practice. It’s about choreography because there are particular moves. There’s many of them and they put them in certain orders. And they do certain moves with names and everyone knows those moves. So instead of a plié, it’s a single leg or something. I love watching them perform these movements and in an extremely graceful way."
- Collier Schorr (PBS | art:21)
PBS | art:21: Loss & Desire featuring Collier Schorr
7 comments:
Collier Schorr was born in New York City in 1963 and attended the School of the Visual Arts, New York. Best known for her portraits of adolescent men and women, Schorr’s pictures often blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy. For her 1998 project “Neue Soldatten,” Schorr juxtaposed documentary-style pictures of a Swedish army battalion with pictures of fake Swedish soldiers played by German teenagers. Several of these young men reappear in Schorr’s 2001 project “Forests and Fields”, where this time they are dressed in an anxious assortment of German, Israeli, Weimar (Nazi), and Vietnam-era American Army uniforms. Schorr’s dubious images not only call into question the fractured role of soldiering in today’s society, but also examine the way nationality, gender, and sexuality influence an individual’s identity. For her “Jens F./Helga” project, Schorr set out to create a comprehensive, yet unusual portrait of a young man by photographing a German schoolboy posed as Helga, the housewife whom American painter Andrew Wyeth studied in secret for nearly twenty years. Whereas in this body of work Schorr is comparing the way men and women pose differently for the artist’s gaze, in photographs of American high school and collegiate wrestlers the artist trains her camera on a tribe of young men whose bodies and athletic training homogenize personal differences. Schorr’s work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 International Center for Photography Triennial. Schorr has exhibited her work internationally at prestigious venues that include the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Consorcio Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. Collier Schorr currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Love her Blumen series.
-Tobias G.
I've always liked Collier Schorr's work--there's always a beautiful sense of tension and questioning in her work that i really appreciate...
she's right about wrestlers having a certain look.
side note:
i wish i could see otto zitko's work in person.
love her work... and she went to my alma mater ;-)
it's true about the forehead and the nose ...but why?
fantastic!
a kiss
Its too bad you only "kinda" like my blog, I really love yours. This video has really familiar ideas for me and I loved watching it, it put me back into a previous frame of thought I had abandoned in my own art...to a degree I guess.
Hopefully I can develope my blog enough that you would like it one day.
Post a Comment