Arrangement #14 (Blumen), 2008

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Lilly Pads #2, 2006

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Lilly Pads #2, 2006

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Die Blaumann-Akademie (Cornelius), 2008

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Arrangement #7 (Blumen), 2005

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Arrangement #9 (Blumen), 2008

all images courtesy the artist 

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After her masculine portraits of wrestlers and young men in military uniforms, American photographer COLLIER SCHORR worked on a project called Forests and Fields, where she documented life (real and imagined) in the small German town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. When she started making flower pictures she wanted to make portraits of something that escaped nationality and identity, but that kept an idea of the “pose” and a kind of struggle between the subject and the photographer – so she uprooted the flowers and transported them to another location, tied them and watched them die.

There’s something illicit about the “Blumen” photos, a literal trespassing. In order to get the flowers, I have to go into strangers’ gardens and yards to steal them. Then I have to go someplace that’s not my place and build this thing; within minutes, the flowers begin to wilt, changing shape and color. And inevitably, the wind blows them down. It takes about six minutes to construct a structure. It’s the perfect illustration of the term deracinated. I like that about it, the clarity of its purpose. It’s the opposite of arranging a still life in a studio with a table—and unlimited time. Here, you tie a flower to two or three sticks and hope it stays up. After I take the picture, I take a step back and look at this little theater or shrine to nothing that I’ve built and then tear it down. The picture is a document of a public sculpture or an act of vandalism.

I made the first “Blumen” picture after looking at MAPPLETHORPE’s Pictures book. I was struck by how much freedom MAPPLETHORPE was able to extract from his model’s restraint—that in tying up and cropping his models, he appears to be able to work with people as forms. I never thought about my flowers as related to his (which I saw as annoyingly erotic); I thought of them in relationship to bondage. I wanted to make the flowers more aggressive and ironic and less docile and sensual. – COLLIER SCHORR for Artforum

More recently she trained her lens on fashion photography, portraying women in preparation for a forthcoming book.