Collier Schorr Quotes

United States, Artist
1963

Collier Schorr is an American artist and fashion photographer best known for adolescent portraits that blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy.Her work explores a multitude of themes, including history, nationality, and war, with an emphasis on identity and gender. Her influences include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, along with German and Jewish social history, World War II, wrestling, painter Andrew Wyeth, and German photographer August Sander.

I always had a sense that clothes, be it uniform or vintage, could help to create a character.

Collier Schorr
I made the first 'Blumen' picture after looking at Robert Mapplethorpe's Pictures book. I was struck by how much freedom Mapplethorpe was able to extract from his model's restraint-that in tying up and cropping his models, he appears to be able to work with people as forms. I never thought about my flowers as related to his (which I saw as annoyingly erotic); I thought of them in relationship to bondage. I wanted to make the flowers more aggressive and ironic and less docile and sensual.

Collier Schorr
- People
- Book
- Flower

I can only approach it as a woman. Masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms. There never seems to be a wide range of emotional definitions of men.

Collier Schorr
- Black
- Emotional
- Term
Having a boy play a girl (and when I say 'play a girl' I don't mean that he is represented as a girl, because he is represented as a young man) is complicated. He knows he's looking at photographs of a girl and copying those poses. So the audience sees him as a man, but he can only see himself as a woman, because that's the model he's looking at. It was a really interesting exchange.

Collier Schorr
- Men
- Girl
- Interesting
I was inspired by the androgyny of Yohji Yamanoto's designs to translate the clothing's dualities onto screen and image. I was playing with a multitude of influences for the S/S 2012 campaign, inspired by the modernist literature and architecture that is in itself a fusion of political and architectural mantras, both dreamy and concrete.

Collier Schorr