Purple Magazine
— F/W 2009 issue 12
purple VISUAL ESSAY
by COLLIER SCHORR
These collages are from my upcoming book Memories of the Administration (steidlMack, 2010), the third volume in the series, “Forests & Fields.” This series presents a body of pictures, taken from 1993 to the present, which document a small town in Germany. Each volume plays with a genre of photography books. The latest one deals with reportage, war photography, magazine assignments, and books that memorialize a particular war or army. The project collages my pictures with pieces of appropriated pictures and bits of texts from books I’ve found. The project concerns many various conflicts and a narrative is formed through their description. The fascination for real war pictures and fictionalized accounts of war, including Hollywood movies, is taken into account, as is my own representation of the way violence, heroism, and fascism are fetishized. By photocopying my own images and others I’ve taken from books, I create a complicated relationship of images, turning myself into an author, while simultaneously creating doubt about which photographs are mine. I have never been involved in any sort of real conflict. However, having spent a lot of time in Germany, I feel as though I’m a conveyor of memories of conflict. Other sources include documentation from a project I did with my father, a renowned muscle-car photographer who followed the short life of a drag racer killed during the Vietnam War. Some of these images are included in my book,There I Was. My father learned photography in the US Army in 1961, while he was waiting to be called up for service during the Berlin Crisis.
Images courtesy of 303 Gallery, from the forthcoming book Memories of the Administration, (2010 steidlMack). Special thanks to Matthew Kraus.
