In the early 1990s, Collier Schorr began working intermittently in southern Germany, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical hauntings.
Combining the overlapping roles of war photographer, wandering portraitist, anthropologist, and family historian, Schorr tells the intertwined stories of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration, and family.
August employs Polaroids made by Schorr in Schwäbisch Gmünd and in this period to explore the liminal space of images that were never intended to persist beyond the immediate moment. Looking back some twenty years, August historicizes the work and examines the devices of creation, revealing the errors in trying to fuse contemporary Germans with their past, implicitly exposing the distance between artist and subject, and between subject and costume. .
Aware of the demons and pitfalls of historical authority, Schorr investigates the space between identification and criticism: a German boy in a feather boa, posed after Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, underscores his interest in the performative history of the fetishism and the uniform, and the way the story moves between documentary and fictionalization, distance and desire.
August is the third volume in a series of books titled Forests and Fields (Wald und Wiesen), after Neighbors/Nachbarn (2006) and Blumen (2010).
Forests and Fields is inherently about bookmaking, an ongoing set of artists' books that uses traditional notions of category to create different points of view. Each publication is part diary, part photo yearbook, part palimpsest, and part scrapbook, and involves a process that constantly expands and contradicts the artist's oeuvre through reissues of the work to create new views through the material. The books share similar dimensions but each is designed as an independent and unique work in itself. The final volume will be text-based, a collection of commissioned and republished writings inspired by the ideas explored in the images. A signed, numbered, boxed special edition of the complete Forest and Fields series game will be available once the project is complete.
Embossed lined hardcover with slanted image
25.5x30.5cm,
104 pages
English
The signed edition includes a card signed by the artist and pasted inside the back cover.
