Collier Schorr

Published by steidlMACK

With an essay by Collier Schorr

 

The Jens pictures began as an experiment. To photograph a young boy in many of the positions that Andrew Wyeth painted the model Helga; to give someone another identity and photograph them through the transformation. The work evolved into a kind of dance between the two models, between painting and photography, between the exacting detail of photography and all the nuances of sketches and drawings. 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. The Wyeth volume became something like a log or sketchbook, the antithesis of photography where the viewer sees only the finished and perfected photograph. Here they see hundreds of attempts. Each page compiles years worth of shots, the same picture taken again and again over time. The camera formats change; the boy's body changes, the light changes. Levels of intimacy change. The boy grows further away from the soft curves of femininity yet closer in his comfort and collaboration.

 

168 pages, 148 color plates
Clothbound hardcover with a tipped-in image in a handmade slipcase
ISBN 3-86521-156-9