Staging the Documentary: Collier Schorr Blends Fiction and Reportage to Reenact History

How do the uniforms exemplify your interest in creating fictional narratives that delve into historical, political, and cultural implications of a phenomenon?

I think there’s no military uniform more recognizable than a Nazi uniform, and that was the success of Hitler’s regime. His rule was making a costume to put people in, that would both inspire, unify, and impress them. It was the number one thing that I could use to make a picture that would shift time and confuse things. The pictures are not essentially heroic, and they’re not guilty. They’re kind of straightforward, because they’re a portrait of the person, and they’re a portrait of a ghost superimposed. There’s one boy that is in costume for Hitler’s personal guard, and he’s also in his own military uniform. At the time, he was doing his military service, and he is the same boy in both uniforms, but in one of the uniforms he’s not really a soldier, except that he is in the army. In the other picture, he’s a mirage; it’s as though he knows he’s not real and that he’s in a fiction. I think that I’ve always looked to clothing to tell a little bit more of a story, and what I think is really apparent in August, is that historically men have had uniforms which look like costumes, and women haven’t for the most part. Women just don’t have the same history of being identified by what they wear. I was very thoughtful about the way in which women in August were portrayed. It’s not so much about their nudity, it’s about their lack of costume or façade.

At the end of the book, there is a sentence where you say that nudes in the book occupy a precarious place. You write they are “Uncomfortable yet necessary in parsing the way in which my own gender has been described throughout photographic history.” How does this relate to your practice?

I was educated in the 80s in art school, in New York, and through post-feminist studies we looked at concepts about appropriation in photography, the male gaze, and women fashion photographers and their work. It took me a long time to even approach photographing women, because I felt that they had been so unrealistically portrayed in photography and film, and to add another picture I felt that it would create pressure for women to try and take power by way of beauty, and it was just not part of my life. As a queer woman, I felt that I was making all of my work and talking about all of my issues through men’s bodies. I had a kind of sadomasochistic relationship with it. I loved boys, but I also felt like I would punish them by making them subject to photography. It was really important to look through the camera at a body that was similar to my own and try to make photographs that both expressed my sense of love and attraction to women and respect for women in identification with a female body. I also asked myself “How do I avoid the problems of representation?” And in the end, you can’t. Representation is a problem that cannot be solved, because everyone is unique, but we are put in categories. And so, when we show a picture of a person, they become representative of many people. The only thing that helps in that is seriality: by working with someone over and over again, so they become very specific.