Muraclay » Photography

Artist of the week 75: Collier Schorr

Skye Sherwin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:37:28 +0000

Behind Schorr's seductive photographs of beguiling, budding manhood lie politically pointed themes

Collier Schorr's photography sets out to seduce. Young athletes sweat and strain in machismo display. A teenage boy strikes an apparently girly pose. Adolescents play dress-up in soldier's uniforms. As attractive as this visual feast is, it asks serious questions about how identity is performed and framed. Schorr, who is an American-Jewish lesbian, typically photographs people who appear to be her exact opposite.

Perhaps Schorr's greatest voyage into the unknown has been her project in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town in southern Germany. She has travelled there every summer for the last 18 years, photographing the life of a small town whose history could scarcely seem more alien. While many of these images feature pastoral idylls and dreams of regeneration, others push notions of otherness to the extreme. Among her series depicting boys dressed as soldiers, one image – entitled Traitor 2001–2004 – is a winningly romantic portrait of an angel-faced, flaxen-haired young man in Nazi uniform. He is, of course, the artist's invention: a present-day German teenager in costume for the camera. The picture might enable Schorr to address the country's painful past, but it also connects with Germany's present, where it remains illegal to display Nazi insignia. Just as significant – if no less troubling – Schorr shows us an image of youthful innocence, far from a movie-stereotype ogre.

While boys are her favoured subject matter, Schorr blurs the boundaries in beguiling if unsettling ways. Her boys frequently look girlish, while girls are to be found masquerading as boys. In Schorr's politically pointed photographs, ambiguity piles up.

Why we like her: Schorr's 2007 exhibition, There I Was, focused on drag-racing star Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder, who had been photographed by her father – who worked as a photojournalist – before dying in Vietnam. Seeking to engage with Snyder's life, Schorr turned to drawing, sketching imaginary scenes from a life that was cut brutally short.

Strangers on a train: One of Schorr's most celebrated series happened entirely by chance, after she met a German teenage boy on a train and asked him to model for her. The images that resulted, Jens F, explore the artist/muse relationship through the filter of American artist Andrew Wyeth's paintings of his German neighbour, Helga. Schorr's photographs, created over several years, feature the boy restaging Helga's poses.

Where can I see her? Collier Schorr's exhibition, German Faces, is at Modern Art gallery in London from 19 February to 20 March 2010.

Skye Sherwin

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Liu Bolin and the art of concealment

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:06:11 +0000

See if you can spot artist Liu Bolin, the 'invisible man' who can camouflage himself against any backdrop, in any city, from China to the UK

Francis Bacon’s private wrestling sessions

Peter Conrad — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:43:44 +0000

Previously unseen images of wrestlers made in Bacon's studio demonstrate the artist's love of the visceral, writes Peter Conrad

Two bodies in a bare, drab room, experimentally trying all the things they can do to each other, from grappling, groping sex to choke holds and karate chops: here is a privileged, confidential glimpse of Francis Bacon's secret theatre, never seen before. It comes from a pile of contact sheets given by Bacon to an electrician who worked in his south Kensington studio; the collection was acquired by the dealer Michael Hoppen, who will be showing it at the art fair in Maastricht next month.

Nothing is known about this long session of polymorphous play. Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants, obliged to wear swimming caps that make them look like medical orderlies kitted out for surgery? Where was the room, which might be called clinical if only the sheet on the floor were cleaner and smoother? And who gave the orders, sitting behind the anonymous photographer and directing the two men as they showed off wrestling holds? That presumably was Bacon: he commissioned the photographs, and used a felt pen to mark the images he fancied, sketching a red cage around the hired thugs.

Bacon admired photographer Eadweard Muybridge's studies of bodies in motion, which treat the physique as an apparatus with elegantly calibrated, agile parts. But his own version of those athletic displays is perverse, an exercise in abstracting the body by force. Picasso would have appreciated the frames in which the two men, wrestling or perhaps sexually coupling, merge into a monstrous quadruped with a pair of arses, one trailing dislocated arm, and no head.

They have come together to cause each other pain: a wrestling bout is the spectacle of physical agony, accompanied by grunts, groans, cries of excruciation. Unlike boxing, wrestling has no neatly aimed knock-out blows, no strict sporting etiquette. Here tThe coup de grace is delivered with an elbow or the back of a hand, after which one man shoulders the other and carts him off like dead meat. Bacon was a connoisseur of abbatoirs, and all that's missing in these photographs is blood, although the scrap of tape on the corner looks like the trace of some intimate, dried-up fluid. Or does this stand for the imprint of Bacon's thumb, gripping the page and depositing an equivalent to the smudges left on the floorcloth by the soles of the wrestlers' dirty feet?

Like Greek tragedy, it is all a performance, as the men demonstrate when they forget their feud and start to jump and skip or dive into a non-existent pool. Opposed moods chase each other across the page like black and white, the two extremes of the photographic spectrum. Brutality at the top left changes to friskiness at the bottom right. But the change happens imperceptibly: sex often looks, and almost always sounds, like murder.

The detail that intrigues me most is the light socket halfway up the wall. It seems quaintly foreign, which suggests that the photographs may have been taken in Paris or New York, where Bacon spent time in the 1970s. Apart from any clue it might give about time and place, it functions, like every object in a Bacon painting, as a memento mori. In this impromptu gymnasium, energetic life goes through its paces, and soon enough confronts death; the light that floods the scene is raw and harsh, but the current can be turned off in an instant. Then perhaps an image will materialise in that dark, empty square at the centre. Some photographs – the nastiest, the most cruelly truthful – have to be looked at with your eyes closed.

The contact sheets will be shown for the first time at the European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, Friday 12 March to Sunday 21 March, 2010. See www.tefaf.com and www.michaelhoppengallery.com

Peter Conrad

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New Topographics: changing the landscape of photography

Sean O'Hagan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:35:34 +0000

With shots of disused warehouses and eerily empty streets, the New Topographics trained their cameras on the creeping urbanisation of 1970s America

Sean O'Hagan

New Topographics

Sean O'Hagan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:00:01 +0000

*****

Sean O'Hagan

New Topographics

Sean O'Hagan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:00:01 +0000

*****

Sean O'Hagan

North faces: John Bulmer’s photographs of life in northern England

Martin Wainwright — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:35:30 +0000

See a stunning collection of images by John Bulmer, a pioneer of colour photography who captured the beauty of 1960s northern England

Martin Wainwright

Exhibitionist: This week’s art shows in pictures

Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:46:49 +0000

From ice cream to elephant dung – there's something for all tastes in exhibitions around the UK this week

Harry Diamond obituary

Eamonn McCabe — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:09:59 +0000

Photographer who snapped Freud, Bacon and the bohemians of Soho

The photographer Harry Diamond, who has died from a brain haemorrhage aged 85, captured the "faces" of bohemian Soho in the 1960s and 70s. He frequented the London watering holes favoured by artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and soon became known as the "man in the mac" who was always carrying a camera.

Diamond was always broke and would take photographs for artists, often of their work and sometimes their portrait, in return for a drink or a meal. The list of his subjects includes Freud, Bacon, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Coldstream, Richard Carline, Michael Andrews, Daniel Farson and Frank Auerbach. He was more famous for those he shot rather than for any particular style. He spent a lot of time with another man who hung around Soho with a camera – John Deacon, considered "a right little runt" by Bacon. One of Diamond's best portraits is of Deacon looking surprisingly upbeat.

A small but fit man, Diamond thought of himself as having been "born good-looking". Freud obviously agreed and had Diamond pose for him on three occasions. One painting became particularly famous: Interior at Paddington (1951), which was commissioned for the Arts Council's exhibition Sixty Paintings for 51, at the Festival of Britain. At the time, artists in London could rent or buy studio space in Paddington cheaply. The carpet in the portrait was bought by Freud from a junk shop in the Harrow Road. The window overlooks the Grand Union canal, and a boy can be seen on the pavement below, looking up at the window.

The Arts Council paid £500 for Interior at Paddington, which went to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. In 1979 Diamond was commissioned to take photographs of buildings around Liverpool. While there, he told the staff of the Walker that the biggest complaint he had about being painted by Freud was being required to stand around posing for six months. When Freud painted him again in Paddington, in 1970, Diamond was seated.

Freud himself remembered Diamond's response to the 1951 portrait: "He said I made his legs too short. The whole thing was that his legs were too short. He was aggressive as he had a bad time being brought up in the East End and being persecuted."

Born into a Jewish family in east London, Diamond never moved out of the area. He first started photographing local buildings with his 35mm camera as he was upset at seeing so many of them being demolished. Although he captured the changing landscape of Bethnal Green in the early 1950s, he would spend a lot of time "up west", especially at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in Soho, where he once worked as a cleaner. He enjoyed the company of jazz musicians and had a great love of dancing, but was once barred from the 100 Club on Oxford Street for being too aggressive. He was also barred for life from the French House in Soho – a rare honour – for throwing a beer, and its glass, at the proprietor.

While working as a stagehand, Diamond met the Hungarian theatre photographer Michael Peto, who encouraged him into full-time photography in the mid-1960s.

Bruce Bernard, the former picture editor of the Sunday Times, found Diamond a complex and sensitive man, and always kept an eye on him. Before Bernard died, he made arrangements for Diamond to be looked after by their mutual friend, the artist Virginia Verran.

Diamond was nervous about publicity. He ducked the offer of a contract from Thames & Hudson for a book of his photographs in case the taxman came digging around. He never had a bank account. His printer, Steve Walsh, who Diamond used for years, was paid in rolled-up fivers that came out of different pockets – and even his socks.

After one late-night incident involving a hammer, he inevitably became known as "Harry the hammer". According to Walsh, talking to him could be dangerous as "he never spoke, he always shouted at you, and showered you into the bargain".

Pubs were his habitat. Roxy Beaujolais, the owner of the Seven Stars in Chancery Lane, knew Diamond for 35 years. He photographed her wedding, but not very well. She used to cut his nails and his hair, and remembers him as being "always well turned out, if a little shabby", and "a true observer who was always out and about, always on the move, especially on the buses. He knew every route across town."

Eight of Diamond's photographs are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. A brother predeceased him.

• Harry Diamond, photographer, born 25 August 1924; died 3 December 2009

Eamonn McCabe

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A Better Place: Dash Snow’s Polaroids in pictures

Sean O'Hagan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:48:09 +0000

A collection of Polaroids by the controversial New York artist and photographer, who died last year

Sean O'Hagan