I was leafing trhrough an old copy of i-D earlier when I came across a spread by artist and photographer Collier Schorr. I don't know too much about her, other than she is an artist who was born and raised in Queens, New York, yet bases much of her practice in the German town of Schwabisch Gmund. Although she incorporates both drawing and collage into her work, it is her photography, particularly her portraiture, which I find most striking. She has been documenting the lives of German people in the town for many years now, inspired in part by the famous series of portraits taken by August Sander but also by the emergence of German photographers Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff in the 90s - "Being intrigued by that work, and then going to Germany and actually looking at the landscape, I imagined the position of an entitled outsider, a character who does not belong but who has assumed some kind of ownership." Like contemporaries such as Rineke Dijkstra and Catherine Opie, she has an ability for capturing the intense, self-conscious gaze of her subjects, the subtle nuances of character and body and the vulnerability one feels when in front of the camera. To me her work is stark, honest and contains a delicate beauty which I guess I strive for in my own work.
Collier Schorr's exhibition 'German Faces' opens on February 19th at Stuart Shave Modern Art.
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