Blumen

The American photographer Collier Schorr has been working in Southern Germany for the past 13 years, compiling Forest and Fields, a fictional documentary portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions. Merging the roles of war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist and family historian, Schorr interweaves tales of war, emigration and family. As an ongoing suite of artist’s books, Forests and Fields is also a project about bookmaking. In the latest installment, Blumen, Schorr moves away from portraying the figure and instead creates arrangements of objects against the landscapes and domestic or commercial settings of her much-investigated town. When people do appear in Blumen, they are usually props in a larger examination of this dialogue between objects and landscape. Flowers, signage, plums, chairs and plaster fawns are the real protagonists of this volume, further detailing the daily life of the townspeople of Schwabish Gmund. A boxed, numbered and signed special edition of the complete set of the Forest and Fields series will be available when the project has been completed.