When my professor’s assignment was to profile a contemporary artist, I knew I wanted to find somebody that was completely unusual and would make me question the norm. As I watch a PBS series trying to find a new contemporary artist to profile, black and white photos of a person came on the screen. The thing that caught me most about these photographs was that I could not figure out the sex of the person. The only thing I knew was that picture and the person in it was beautiful and it made me wonder what their story was. The artist responsible for this was Collier Schorr.
Collier Schorr was born in New York in 1963 and currently resides and works in Brooklyn. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in 1986. Schorr’s media is in photography and she is best known for her artwork which blends gender identity. A common theme is her use of blending fiction like qualities, as well as fantasy. Most of her work focuses on adolescents and sexuality. Her work “Wrestler loves American” was a series of pictures of high school wrestlers. She was able to convey a wide range of emotion through the expressions from the wrestlers. She states that she was able to capture theses emotions through their victories and losses. As well as being able to capture the closeness and similar personalities that most wrestlers have in common. This was what captivated me the most. When I first saw a photo from this collection, the boy reminded me of my boyfriend, who is a fellow wrestler. There was a quality in his look that Schorr and I, see in a majority of wrestlers, the soft aggressiveness. I was able to identify that quality with my boyfriend without knowing that the entire collection focused on personalities of wrestlers. Schorr also discusses how the photos are representative of her perspective if she was a male. “Wrestler love America” was on display in the Whitney biennial in 2002 and the Jewish museum.
Schorr work of her 1998 “Neue Soldatten” and 2001 “Forest and Fields” focused on soldiers and the effects of warfare. In “Neue Soldatten” (New Soldiers), she had teenage Germen boys pose in military uniforms in the woods. In “Forest and Fields” she had the same boys pose but instead they were dressed in Nazi uniforms. Schorr discusses in an interview how those boys really enjoy playing the heroes and held a confidence to them. But when they were in the Nazis uniforms, there was uncertainity to their movements that translates into the quality of the photographs. Schorr was praised for her work because of her view point as a lesbian and of Jewish heritage. She studied the effect the Nazis uniforms had on the boys as well as gender identity by having them poses very femininely.
The thing that drew me to Collier Schorr’s art was her focus on adolescents and sexuality. Her collection of Jens’s F/ Helga was my favorite piece. She studied Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of “Helga”, a woman he studied in secret for over 20 years and made 246 works focusing around her. Pictures include her nude as well as fully dressed in feminine poses. Schorr uses the Helga series as a template, but instead she chose to study a young boy for several years. She poses the boy very femininely, as well as having him dress in women’s undergarments at one point. The reason I like this piece is because it conveys the unsurely feelings of adolescents; the feeling to find our personality and accept our sexuality.
(Critics)
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