The third volume in a series made in the small southern German town of Schwabisch Gmund, August investigates identification, fetishization, and critique of history through referentially layered portraits by renowned photographic artist Collier Schorr.
At four years old, Collier Schorr accompanied her father, an automotive photographer, to a racetrack where she met the charismatic drag racer Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder, who was working on his dream car, a 67 "Ko-Motion" Corvette. An article with the haunting headline, "While Astoria Chas is doing his thing in Vietnam his friends are racing his L-88," followed. By the time it was published, Snyder had already gone to Vietnam and tragically died on August 27, 1968, shortly after his twenty-first birthday. He never got to drive his car, which his friends raced, setting an AHRA record for its class. This work marks a shift in medium and concept for Schorr. Using her father's images of Snyder and his snapshots from Vietnam, she incorporates professional reportage photos to illustrate Snyder's journey from Queens to Vietnam and back. The drawings contrast with vintage car magazine articles and Schorr's own photographs. This volume, rooted in photography, engages with the medium while challenging its role as a document of the past. It offers a multifaceted exploration of escape, culture, dreams, and mortality, presenting an expressionistic portrait of the dichotomies of late 1960s America amid the turmoil of war.
Jens F. is a limited-edition artist’s book using photography and appropriation to subtly explore ideas of desire, gender, identification and performance. In Collier Schorr’s own words: “The Jens pictures began as an experiment. To photograph a young boy in many of the positions that Andrew Wyeth painted the model Helga… The work evolved into a kind of dance between the two models, between painting and photography… As a way of keeping track of all these images, I began to clip out the contact prints I liked and to paste them into Wyeth’s book The Helga Pictures.”