Collier Schorr — August

The third volume in Collier Schorr's Forests and Fields series, built from Polaroids she took in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a small town in southern Germany where she has worked intermittently since the early 1990s.

Schorr, born in 1963, has family in the town. Taking the parts of family historian, anthropologist, travelling portraitist and war photographer, she put together a portrait of the place that is part record and part fiction, with figures from its history moving through it. The Polaroids were never meant to last beyond the moment.

Some twenty years on, the book looks both at the history in the pictures and at how they were made, including where the attempt to set present-day Germans inside their own past falls short. In one picture a German boy wears a feather boa, staged after Liliana Cavani's film The Night Porter, a pointer to her interest in fetish and uniform as performance, and in how history slides between documentary and fiction.

It follows Blumen (2010), which came after Neighbors/Nachbarn (2006). Each volume is part diary, part scrapbook and part photo annual, and returns to earlier work through fresh edits; the books are close in size, but each is designed to stand on its own.

MACK, 2022. 104 pages, debossed, lined hardcover with a tipped-in image, 25.5 x 30.5 cm.