NEIGHBORS/NACHBARN

Publisher: steidlMACK
Language: –

Photography: Collier Schorr
Design: –
Essays: –

The American photographer Collier Schorr has been working in Southern Germany for the past 12 years, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions. For Schorr, the German landscape is a map of her own history, both imagined and inherited. Combining the overlapping roles of war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist and family historian, the series Forest and Fields (Wald und Wiesen) tells the interwoven stories of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family. Forests and Fields is intrinsically about book making, an ongoing suite of artist’s books that utilizes traditional notions of category to create different points of view. Each volume is part diary, photo-annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook, and involves a process which constantly expands and contradicts the artist’s oeuvre through re-edits of the work to create new views through the material. The first two volumes will focus on Neighbors and Reportage. Subsequent volumes will include landscapes, architecture, flowers and sport. Each volume will share the same dimensions but each will be designed as an independent and unique work in itself. The final volume will be text based, a collection of commissioned and re-published writings inspired by the ideas explored in the pictures.