Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr was born in New York in 1963 and attended the School of Visual Arts. Best known for her portraits of adolescents, she blends realism with elements of fiction and fantasy in her photographs. Schorr's work suggests desire--her own and that of the viewer--through the vaguely sexual poses and sometimes confrontational gazes of her subjects. These works defy neat categorization along conventional homosexual/heterosexual or male/female binary axes. Instead, Schorr represents desire as something in between, an inchoate, fluid, and unintentional system of counter readings and imperfectly mirrored responses. Taking inspiration from the photographs of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, Schorr's more recent works chronicle fashion and nature and use props to make pictures that feel arranged and compromised yet have a heightened sense of emotion.
Schorr's photographs are in the collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of Art.
Mary O'Donnell Hulme