For over 25 years, fashion photographer Collier Schorr has captured the portraits of adolescent
youth, blurring the boundaries between gender and identity. To date, theThe New York-based
artist has shot advertising campaigns for Comme des Garçons, Lanvin, Dior Louis Vuitton
and Saint Laurent and has worked alongside filmmakers such as Nathalie Canguilheim.
Schorr is a regular contributor to Dazed magazine, shooting both cover stories and editorial. To date,
Schorr’s work has been featured at international art galleries, including the MOMA, the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Le Consortium in Dijon, and the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam. 5 monographic publications featuring Schorr’s photography have been published in
the UK, including her 2005 book, Jens F, based on Andrew Wyeth’s “The Helga Pictures”
photography series.
Schorr was born and raised in Queens, New York to an automotive journalist father and a
therapist mother. In 1985, she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in her native New York
with a degree in journalism. Upon graduation, Schorr worked as an assistant to artists Peter
Halley and Richard Prince, as well as in the 303 Gallery at New York.
In 1987, the photographer created her first profitable work of art by appropriating fashion ads on
plexiglass. Growing up, she took an interest in collecting magazine cut-outs and collating them.
For decades Schorr visited a small town in southern Germany to shoot flowers, buildings, and
most notably adolescent boys, marking the start of her fascination with youth, gender and
identity.gender and identity politics, soon crossing into taboo boundaries through her lens.
In following years, Schorr documented the ways nationality, gender, and sexuality informed one’s
identity, showcased through her work photographs of German boys in Nazi uniforms and of high
school varsity athletes in New Jersey. In 1995, Purple Magazine's editor,
Olivier Zahm
,
commissioned Schorr for a fashion editorial on Helmut Lang — her first major commission for a
fashion publication.
Over the years Schorr’s work has been exhibited in prestigious venues around the world
including the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and during the
2002 Whitney Biennial in New YorkSchorr has partaken in dozens of solo and group exhibitions
globally, including a solo exhibition in 2014 titled 8 Women, four at London’s Modern Art Gallery
and a joint exhibition with
Virgil Abloh
and Dazed 100 artist Eric N. Mack. Schorr was appointed
to the Yale faculty in 2003 and has served as senior critic in photography. In 2019, Vanity fair
added Schorr to its portfolio of regular photographers as the only woman alongside the acclaimed
Annie Leibovitz in the group.
Today, Schorr is represented by her former employer 303 Gallery and often shoots in her
Williamsburg studio, where she has lived since 1989.
Since first working with a fashion publication in the mid-1990s, Schorr has gone on to shoot
covers and editorials for Vogue, I-D, V Magazine, Porter, Dazed, Re-edition, 032c, Another,
Document, Fantastic Man, the Gentlewoman Self-Service and T Magazine. She has captured with
notable faces such as Michelle Obama for the New York Times and
Bella Hadid
for DKNY.
With her career-defining mission to de-centralise merchandising and encourage diversity in her
photography, Shorr also uses her social media as a platform for activism under the hashtag
#humanityvisibilityequalspower. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein Allegations, Shorr lifted
the cloak of ‘professionalism’, often used to guise sexual harassment by photographers, calling
upon casting agents to safeguard their clients on Instagram stories. After model
Nathan Westling
broke the news of his gender transition in early 2019, Shorr was the first to shoot and interview
him for i-D.
