Born 1963
Lives New York
Michael Tiger
2008
Black and white archival pigment print
61x51cm
Courtesy the artist
The title of photographer Collier Schorr’s short documentary video Cowboys at the Cinderella Motel (2007) could serve as a neat summary of her exploration of social constructions of identity and gender. Schorr casts her sensitive camera eye onto mostly male subjects implicated in struggles in specific places and times: rural German youths dressed for war (‘New Soldiers’, 2008), American high-school wrestlers. More recently she has opted for drawing and a figure from her own past named Charlie Snyder, who was killed in the Vietnam War (There I Was, 2008). Schorr foregrounds the extent to which moments of promise and the loss of innocence are intertwined, and eschews a typological approach that emphasizes similarities for one that reveals the slightest differences, letting ambiguity prevail. (VR)
