In the summer of 1989, Collier Schorr traveled to the south of Germany for the first time. As a Queens native who had spent her 20s studying at the School of Visual Arts and knocking around the queer clubs of a then-lawless East Village, Schorr’s discovery of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a small city half an hour or so west of Stuttgart, was a revelation. The hometown of her ex-partner, it offered a peaceful, bucolic existence that felt a world away from the clamor and chaos of her life as an artist in Manhattan.
She would visit every summer for almost 20 years, documenting her trips in an ongoing book series, Forest and Fields, the first two volumes of which—2006’s Neighbors/Nachbarn and 2010’s Blumen—probe the mythos of the countryside in the German cultural imagination, as well as its role in the Second World War through the inclusion of imagery that nods to the country’s dark past. “It’s not documenting history, it’s documenting the way history lives in contemporary culture,” says Schorr. “It’s a bit meta in that way.”
For beneath the pastoral hills and fresh-faced youths that Schorr captured on the surface, there were deeper, more complex reasons for her fascination with the region, stemming largely from her own queer, Jewish identity. “I don’t have any firsthand experience with the Holocaust, of course, but I have this huge cultural legacy, and part of the work was to go into the other side of that history and to try and understand it a bit—how my identity was constructed by this huge trauma that has a whole other culture on the other side,” she explains.
Schorr’s latest book, published this summer, continues her Forest and Fields series, and is titled both as an homage to the great German portrait photographer August Sander, and as a nod to the sun-kissed haze of a sweltering German summer. As for the 12-year gap between this installment and the last, Schorr says it has less to do with her stratospheric rise as a fashion photographer—she regularly shoots campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, and Calvin Klein, as well as glossy magazine covers featuring the likes of Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, and Nicole Kidman—and more to do with needing a little distance from a project that was so personal to her.
“I stopped dating [my ex-girlfriend] around 2008, and I almost closed the studio and acclimated to being back in New York full-time,” she explains. “It was really complex to look at that material, and I think I needed some space and a break from the intensity of the contents.” While there were a number of other iterations of this third volume, she eventually settled on its current format a few years back: All of the images are Polaroids that Schorr took as “studies” for the large-format photographs she was taking on film through the 1990s and early 2000s, with most of them featuring familiar faces (and even similar setups) from her previous books. “I think there was something interesting about the Polaroid book being a mirror of the first two volumes, almost pulling the curtain back to reveal the making of the work,” she says. “There’s one picture in particular of a brother and sister where you just see the heads, and the whole body is missing. I remember being so upset at the time, as their expressions were perfect, and it felt like a huge mistake. But in this book, those imperfections function in a much more metaphorical way—it has this instant nature, but it also brings something more fragile.”
That sense of fragility also extends to the precariousness of the moments the Polaroids capture, with many of these visions of youthful bliss taking place as people paddle across a lake on kayaks or lie naked in the grass; there’s a sense of the scenes existing outside of time and place, even as you are abruptly drawn back to the stark reality of their historical context through shots of a military jacket or cargo pants. The ambiguous, alluring beauty of Schorr’s work hinges on its ability to evoke two things at once, as in her famous series on high school wrestlers, where the tension between these totemic figures of American masculinity and a more subversive, homoerotic subtext is as interesting as the image itself. Here, it’s the innocence of her subjects in the brief, full flush of youth, yet set against the backdrop of a more menacing history.
Equally striking is Schorr’s eye for using clothes—and more specifically uniforms, here studied with an intensity that borders on the fetishistic—as a storytelling device, many years before she became one of the world’s most internationally renowned fashion photographers. “I think I’ve always seen clothing as a fantastic lie, as the thing that can make something look like something else,” she says. While Schorr made her first venture into fashion photography thanks to a commission from Olivier Zahm’s Purple magazine in 2005, she notes that even before then, she’d arrive to shoot the kids in Schwäbisch Gmünd with boxes of clothing for them to war. “I would think about my early days of going shopping on Christopher Street and buying Levi’s and handkerchiefs, and these things that were part of the semiotics of homosexual iconography, so it was a really easy step over into military clothing, because that was a big part of it too,” she adds.
One of the most arresting images in August features a shirtless young man in a military cap with a feather boa slung over his shoulder, loosely inspired by Liliana Cavani’s controversial erotic drama The Night Porter, from 1974, which featured Charlotte Rampling as a Holocaust survivor who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with a former Nazi officer. “I would say that picture is about as devious as I could get away with here,” says Schorr. “It was really intended to completely confuse the character. Is it a prisoner of war? Is it a Jew the American soldiers rescued? Is it a German soldier dressing up in this stuff? There’s a performance going on, but it’s not clear if the performer is in on the show. And that’s what I wanted to do—to make a picture where you just weren’t sure if the person you were looking at was participating or not.”
Still, Schorr’s intention for the book was not to be provocative, but to bust open the taboos that still linger when discussing the Holocaust today—something that feels as urgent as ever, she notes, given Putin’s recent invocation of the Nazis as a reason to invade Ukraine. “I went to press with the book and the invasion of Ukraine happened, and the idea that Putin could bring up trying to get rid of Nazis in 2022... I just thought, well, this truly is the ghost that will never die,” says Schorr. “I had family from Ukraine once upon a time, and it just shows how the world turns and countries are constantly conscripted into their neighbors’ drama. I dedicated the book to the state of Palestine, and I didn’t do it as some kind of gesture—it’s about feeling a sense of responsibility for a country far away that exists as the result of war and conflict.” Indeed, dig deeper under the surface of August, and it’s clear that in Schorr’s eyes, what’s past is prologue. As she herself puts it: “How do you dissect nostalgia and identity? And what is the past, really, when it’s still informing your identity now?”
August by Collier Schorr is on sale now.