Neighbors/Nachbarn

The American photographer Collier Schorr has been working on and off in Southern Germany for the past 12 years, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions. For Schorr, the German landscape is a map of her own history, both imagined and inherited. Combining the overlapping roles of war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist and family historian, in this series, entitled Forest and Fields, Schorr tells the interwoven stories of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family. Forest and Fields is an ongoing suite of artist’s books that utilizes traditional notions of category to create different points of view. Each volume is part diary, photo annual, palimpsest and scrapbook, and involves a process which constantly expands and contradicts the artist’s oeuvre through re-edits of the work. The first two volumes will focus on reportage and portraiture, and subsequent volumes will include landscapes, architecture, flowers and sports. The final volume will be textbased, and will collect commissioned and re-published writings inspired by the ideas explored in the pictures. A boxed, numbered and signed special edition of the complete set of the Forest and Fields series will be available once the project has been completed.