Collier Schorr

DS

Since we last saw one another, Rolling Stone published their February 2024 issue. The cover features a photograph you captured of Kristen Stewart wearing a jockstrap. It caused quite a storm. Were you expecting such a reaction?

CS

I wasn’t prepared for it. Because I’ve been shooting with them since they were 16 years old, I’m used to only thinking about the work, not necessarily its reception, as we’re making it. But, as they’ve gotten older and continued to become more famous, that has changed. [Laughs.] The reception of the work is constantly a surprise and adjustment, though I sensed that people would be excited to see these photos.

While we were conceptualizing the shoot, they asked me to photograph them as a masc and femme version of the character from their film Love Lies Bleeding (2024). We wanted the images to feel more than mere depictions of them performing masculinity and femininity. We tried to show what those specific categories are and aren’t at the same time. We were pursuing this question: What if we were allowed to craft perfect gender expressions that pulled from a multitude of histories, many of which are still underground, and put them on display?

We decided to specifically probe the wealth of material made by gay men, which has long influenced my practice because it was the work that first reached the mainstream. It’s a shame that I had little chance to be influenced by lesbian photographers because of how marginalized their work has been. It just hasn’t been seen as material that might be commercialized. To the point: I encountered Peter Hujar when I should have been feasting on Tee A. Corinne. We were also both interested in how female sexuality exists in photography and might be depicted in more aggressive ways. For us, aggression means amplifying the projection of one’s own desirability. That was, if unsurprisingly, all very complicated. Projections loom large in the room with someone like them.

DS

Did you have specific photographers in mind?

CS

Because I know Kristen and knew we were working with Olga Mill, the stylist, we had everything we needed to make this happen in the room. I didn’t need to reference Lisa Lyon. I had Kristen Stewart right in front of me. I think the rawness and dumbness of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Lyon in his photo book, Lady, Lisa Lyon (1991), was really helpful for us. In Love Lies Bleeding, Kristen kind of plays this Lisa Lyon-type figure so it felt like a natural parallel. We resurrected her. She’s alive and she’s faggot in the way dykes can be faggots. We weren’t interested in only making images for presentation’s sake—we wanted to make something that felt real.

Indeed, I’m not someone that really brings photographs to set to reference. I have too many things to do to look at my phone during a shoot. The beauty of working with someone like Kristen is that they’re used to being directed and directing. They just finished directing their first feature in Latvia. So, they had a real sense of like, “Okay, my character’s over here.”

DS

What about the jockstrap?

CS

The jockstrap was something I asked Olga to bring to set far in advance. The beauty of that shoot is that we were all on the same page. There’s a moment in which Kristen has their thong underneath the jockstrap, and by that point, the pictures started making themselves. I think I said to her, “Oh, just cut that thong off.” We didn’t even have time to stop, but we didn’t need that thong. [Laughs.] In doing that, it was like an umbilical cord was cut off. It set free this fantasy of what’s in the jockstrap and also what the subject’s relationship is to it. As Kristen said in the 5 million interviews they did about that cover, it’s like volition. It’s a movement. It was effective because this person is projecting sexuality rather than receiving a gaze. I could talk about it for hours because I feel like Kristen is an extension of me on late-night television addressing homophobia vis-à-vis these pictures.

DS

So much of your work since the late 1980s has explored constructions of gender, especially masculinity. A lot of your photographs or series in the past involved cis boys at ages of transition and ambiguity and/or performing in spaces associated with hypermasculinity but also homosociality, like sports or the military. But your last gallery show, which happened a decade ago now, was pictures of women. That show was very commercially and critically successful. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the difference between exploring these ideas with women versus men and the reception of them in the art world in particular but also more broadly.

CS

I wish there was a visual description of the flames coming from me right now. The thoughts that come to mind when I think about who I was and the conditions I encountered when  I first started to make work are frustrating. I had no firsthand experience with masculinity, and that early work was an expression of my desire to develop a relationship to that thing that was unknown to me, and in my mind, inscrutable. When I was studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, representational politics were huge. In some ways, photography didn’t exist as a medium for self-expression in the art world I was a student of and exposed to. I knew it was a platform for Jack Pierson, Nan Goldin, and Wolfgang Tillmans, and I knew photography was a political tool for Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. However, given the state of the art world in 1985, the photography that I was exposed to in school was wary of using the camera to re-present the world. Take, for instance, Richard Prince’s Biker Girls, which is a series I really grew up with. I worked at 303 Gallery when he lived with Lisa Spellman and had his studio there. Whatever anyone thought the work was or wasn’t, it was gathered by him and re-authored, though it wasn’t authored first hand. He was interested in recontextualization. Conversely, Cindy Sherman’s work was made within the confines of her studio and her own body.

When I was in Germany making pictures, I chose to make them with a boy. That work felt illicit given my distance from masculinity and men generally. It was a form of investigation. I could do things to a male subject that I was afraid to do to a female subject. It escalated that kind of s/m relationship that I had with men and Germany. I was confronting a history that made me feel like nothing could be broken, but I was trying to break and refuse everything. In that sense, the photographs belie a kind of dom/sub construct.

I think the greatest disappointment for me at the time was that most interest in the work seemed to come from gay men. They really understood my work and were excited to see it. For them,  it was a hallmark of a new kind of examination of themselves, their culture, and their idea of desire. But this interest co-opted my identity as a female author and figured into the history of how men generally construct the identity of female photographers.  For me, that resulted in some sense of like, “It’s too easy shooting men,” and I felt the absence of women in my work was a signpost for the repression I was experiencing. There was this shift in what I was willing to do and the risks I was willing to take. For a long time, it felt incredibly risky to launch female bodies into the world.

DS

You mentioned Richard Prince and working at 303 Gallery. Did you seek him out without knowing that you wanted to be a photographer?

CS

I’m a self-taught artist. I know it’s odd to say, but it’s true. I grew up with photography because my dad was a photographer, but, while studying at the School of Visual Arts, I only took one photography class.  It was taught by Laurie Simmons but she quit, and so Stephen Frailey Fraley took over. He was showing with 303 Gallery at the time. I heard that they needed an intern and I applied. My interview was with Lisa Spellman and Gerard Malanga, who was exhibiting a show at the time. It was an amazing interview. I started working there immediately and met Richard. I remember Lisa saying, “Oh, Richard wants to meet you. I told him that you love Fran Lebowitz and you should go to his studio at such and such time.”

I met Richard and he also hired me. I worked as his part-time assistant. Eventually, I moved into his old studio because I went through a breakup, and I ended up living at the gallery. When I was assisting, the most important thing I learned to appropriate. For Richard, the author could be many things: a guy who shoots his girlfriend on a motorcycle, a guy who loves cars, a person who stares at the ocean, a stand-up comedian, etc. Richard escaped a gendered authorship at some point. I think it’s funny that I ended up working for the one artist who writes and doesn’t really make his own artwork but instead repurposes material.  During this moment in the art world, you could make something without very many technical skills.  All you needed were a lot of ideas and motivation. It was clear that politics were all over the place. I know a lot of artists whose needs weren’t met by postmodern feminism and critique at the time. I started making pictures because I was working in a gallery and didn’t see any feminist work that paired pictures of beautiful women with language and critique. I started making work that felt indebted to the likes of Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Lorna Simpson, and Adrian Piper. It was such an important time for women artists because they dominated New York photography.

The first works I made involved appropriated fashion ads mounted on plexiglass with written text about cruising girls. In 1991, I started using a camera in Germany. I think the decision to travel there was the result of my relationship with Lisa Spellman, who, at the time, was working with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. With them, I was looking at photography in this whole new way and thinking differently about Germany.  When I finally got there, I was in these landscapes that felt very foreign to me. I realized it felt different because I was gay, because I was Jewish, because I had become Americanized, and because I was navigating a small working-class family atmosphere. While the ingredients were really different, the grass was the same color. I started making work about Germany as if it had never been photographed before.

DS

Your entry into the gallery space involved organizing shows and writing about art rather than making it. You mentioned that in the 1980s you felt one didn't need to have a background in making art to become an artist. Rather, it was about having or exploring ideas. Do you feel like your practice as a photographer is akin to curating—selecting works or images to make an argument?

CS

Well, I’ve only ever curated one show with Fareed Armaly at 303 Gallery. It was a show of all the people I had been to school with or had been connected to. So it featured Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Gregg Bordowitz (with Testing The Limits), Silvia Kolbowski, and Marianne Weems. Fareed and I put ourselves in it as well. I wasn’t an artist, but I saw there was no lesbian representation. I thought, I’ll be that.

Nowadays, someone in that position would start a gallery. I don’t remember anyone of my generation doing that. I think my generation was so busy working for other artists. Most of us were not going to graduate school. But you really could participate in a different way at the time. The stakes were so low, and the economy was terrible. It was just such a strange yet scary but goofy time.

DS

It’s funny to hear you say that you organized the show kind of about yourself because I mistook the self-portraits by Andrea Fraser as being by you. It’s a series of photographs of Fraser performing various archetypes, almost like early Cindy Sherman works. In one image, she’s a nurse, another a dominatrix, another a dyke. I thought you were the person in the images.

CS

At that time, I would have never in a million years seen myself as a viable subject. I didn’t know that I could give myself permission to be the subject. It was too steep a climb to give myself permission to do certain things.

Andrea made that piece for the show, and DW Fitzpatrick took the photos. It was an intentional contrast to Sherman, who wasn’t on the line for being anything because she was everything. Andrea’s piece suggested that she could and did inhabit these sexual fantasy characters. It is more complex, involving her history and a critique of institutional terrorism. I wish I had known about Martha Wilson’s self-portraits as a point of comparison.

DS

Over the last decade or so, really since your last show at 303, you’ve increasingly worked within the realm of fashion and editorial photography. Has that been a conscious choice or a natural progression? What’s appealing about this context over galleries and museums?

CS

On some level, I think I became a fashion photographer in the same way I became an artist: by accident. I didn’t think I could be an artist, and I especially didn’t think I could be a fashion photographer. [Laughs.] And it was a specific time in my life because the last show I had done was the last show of my German work. There was a banner that hung from the ceiling that said, “This War is Over.” And for me, it was. I captured the ghosts of my Jewish nightmares, fell in love with them, and blew them up to scare people and to make them confront their own attraction to those mythologies. The ones Lorraine O’Grady introduced to me in her lecture “Fetish and Racism” in my first year at SVA.

I wanted a historical scar, I wanted to reactivate the trauma and drag every boy I could find through the mud with me. But I had no one to fight with directly. So I took the fight to the magazines. I started to slow down art production because I was ramping up this other work. As an art photographer, you have a bunch of people watching you do something or nobody watching. It’s a lot of spectacle. At some point, all you’re seeing is the ideas of this person in front of you. Working in fashion gave me permission for these pictures to be taken. There was a platform where, for me, there were safe boundaries. You weren’t taking advantage of someone because they had a vested interest in the product. People haven’t had a huge vested interest in art pictures, at least historically. An exception was when I was photographing the wrestlers. I really felt like those kids had an interest in seeing themselves replicated. And so that work felt really reciprocal.

DS

Why do you think that was?

CS

Compared to the other sports in high school, it’s more of a closeted sport, right? It takes place in a dark room that no one goes to except these guys. And it’s so difficult. I think they really liked having a witness; to have someone in there and recognizing what they do is interesting and special. For me, that was my first foray into thinking about dance, because I treated it like choreography, moving around them. I shot their practice sessions, which meant I knew where they were going, and I could walk around them because I knew the dance.

DS

You “appropriated” a lot of your own fashion editorial work for your last show at 303. In a way, you were going back to your roots of working with Richard Prince. Can you speak a little about that decision?

CS

At that point, I had been repurposing the shoots with the idea of taking them back from a magazine and putting them in their rightful context. I planted images. The show spanned the first teenage girl I shot in Germany to models that I had shot six months before. What I remember was that the work was introduced to a whole different constituency of viewers.

That show also made plain the way in which the female body conveys art while the male body conveys fetish and subculture. It really was eye-opening to me and completely obvious in retrospect, like, “Oh, people do like pictures of women.” Of course they do. And that’s why I didn’t make them for so long. It was too obvious. But I think that my objective was to put them in a context with each other so that there was nothing for free in that show. There was no free beauty, there was no spectacle, and there was no cheap gaze. I wanted to deflect their attitudes and projections;  to quote Kristen Stewart, I wanted to negate their “volition of desire or volition of sexuality.”

Going back to Kristen, and dealing with the outrage of middle America, who probably had never noticed my work before, they were acting as if I had come out of nowhere and suddenly had an opinion. They tried to make Kristen answer for my work, which wasn’t fair. The reason people don’t like these pictures is because Kristen is someone who they’ve long objectified. To see Kristen reclaim their desire upset and devastated certain people. She said, “Yes, I’m a sexual person who can sell that image and be in charge of it,” and that tripped people out. This is very different from someone who’s just like, “I own my sexual power.” I think the former hits the patriarchy harder and in a place where they’re not often hit. [Laughs.] It reminds me of the early women who made forays into pornography and who would direct films from the point of view of the orgasm. This, not to suggest that my images are pornography or pornographic for pornography’s sake.

DS

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the issue of lesbian visibility, given the range of constructions of gender and sexuality that have evolved or been named. How does lesbian visibility fit within that landscape today versus, say, 30 years ago?

CS

It’s changed so much. Isn’t there a Judith Butler book out now that says, “Why is gender so scary?” or something?

DS

Who’s Afraid of Gender? Were you reading Butler’s writing in the early 1990s? Like, was Gender Trouble an important touchstone for you in terms of your thinking about gender identity, on a personal level and in terms of making work?

CS

What I could absorb from Butler, I’m sure I did. I was partial to Jane Gallop and Hélène Cixous. Obviously, I looked at Gender Trouble, I probably read parts of it—who didn’t? It’s so dense, and I think in retrospect, we see that gender is a moving target. I was talking to a trans philosophy student who wrote a paper disagreeing with Butler. Her paper had to do with the difference in the conditions of childhood that weren’t so flexible when Butler was a child or even someone who’s now 45 years old was a child. Still, all the language and theory available have created more flexibility for people to exist. My own gender expands and contracts.

I don’t know if you do this, but I make notes, and I’m like, “Did I say this? I hope I said this.” [Laughs.] But I have here in my notebook, “Uncovering myths reveals more circumstances than freedom.” I don’t know if that’s me, but I think that’s what I’m exploring through my work. When you demystify a certain understanding of sex or gender, more complications and gaps tend to appear. And I think this new project that I’m working on, which is primarily portraits of trans and non-binary people, people assigned female at birth, and butch lesbians, is concerned with how to create a personal constituency that can hold a line. That’s an important task for me because my gender identification seems concomitant with how I see myself in contrast to others.

Gaps in language have always been really interesting to me.  The idea that you could make a book of not boys and girls, and it could appear to be a book of boys and girls, proves that the binary is still there. It’s been really important for me as a community member and a 60-year-old to be there as a witness for younger people. I  still find myself shooting boys and girls, still bringing an easy joy to nude trans woman and a momentary anxiety in asking a trans boy to take off his shirt.

DS

That’s the beauty of photography, right? It allows for that kind of ambiguity. So photography in the 1980s and 1990s explored the reality effects associated with the medium. Today, most people know that photographs are staged or constructed. How have your own thoughts about this shifted over the years?

CS

For me, the biggest issue with photography is its ability to cause pain. I took advantage of the fact that photography lies and that things look real and they’re not. I could get away with certain things because it was obvious that photography lies. If it wasn’t, it would be really like then I would be making Nazi propaganda, right?

DS

Now you’re working on a book that incorporates your father’s photographs, right?

CS

My dad Martyn L. Schorr photographed and wrote about high-performance cars in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. That culture was very much connected to machismo but with a focus outside of conventional society—about long-haired guys, fat guys, guys that seemed like they didn’t graduate high school. At some point, I started thinking about car bodies and all the bodies in my work. Years before, I had given Richard Prince my dad’s books and magazines; all the GNX car sculptures Richard had their genesis in that material.

When I started photographing kids for the book, I realized I had grown up with customization and the language of hormones, actually. Many of the subjects I had met when they were modeling started to draw kind of parallels between these two cultures. In terms of creating a new body, a new car,  customization, speed and power, hormones, testosterone, estrogen, tits, no tits, fins, spoilers, and detailing. Drag racing and Trans Am. It’s all there. And then there’s passing, being identified for what you are—a trans person—or being received as a cis person. It’s what I’ve learned by focusing on people who are very individual, that’s what has been revealed to me. It’s like learning what’s under the hood of a Corvette. Like, what does it mean that one model took off their shirt and this other model didn’t? What’s been kind of played around with? What’s been designed? In what ways do these people harken back to their ancestors? And, conversely, how are they living a completely new identity and life?

DS

How has this project helped you think about photography and pain?

CS

Well, my new realization at 60 is this: men aren’t afraid of being in trouble like women. I always looked at the work of male artists  (because they were there as the only big artists) and thought, “How did they do this?,” or “How would they let themself go this far?” Or, when I took my first pictures in Germany of this 13-year-old boy with lipstick and eyeliner topless, I thought about Larry Clark and asked myself,  “How does Larry Clark get them to take their pants off? How come I can’t do that? Why don't I do that? What's wrong with me? Did I not  go the extra mile?” I thought to  myself, “Well, I guess I’m morally superior.”  [Laughs.] But what I realized is that men have an attitude that’s like, “Well, if I get in trouble, I get in trouble. I'll deal with it later.” I think I have always seen photography as the route to being in trouble, of getting people mad at you. And so when people aren’t mad at me, I’m surprised. I’m like, “Well, wait, aren’t you mad at me that I didn’t do X, Y, Z.” I think that must also be an attraction for me. That there’s a relationship to risk in photography that doesn’t exist in drawing. Drawing is talked about as set up. A drawing is never a recreation. A drawing is never fake because a drawing is never real. Photography is the opposite. Photography is more dangerous, exciting, collaborative, and hated. It’s more everything. The only thing it’s not more of is archival. It just doesn’t last as long.

DS

Or more expensive in terms of the art market…

CS

If you look at the timeline of my work, you can trace where I moved my game piece. I had just seen an article about art prices crashing, and so it was like, you can sketch this out in a parenthetical [Collier leans back with her hands in a relaxed position]. I hated that part of being in the art world. I hated the selling pressure. I hated the pricing. I hated the responsibility of having to perform a certain way, of worrying that my artwork had to perform in a certain way. It’s the art world that feels commercial to me.  When I’m doing fashion shoots,  I don’t even think about the work selling because it’s already been sold. I know I’m getting paid for everything. I’m good by the time the shoot has wrapped.  [Laughs.]

DS

The printed page has been so important to your practice, from photography books to magazines. How do you feel like your work functions differently on the printed page and in a gallery or museum?

CS

The most exciting thing for me is to lack certainty. Like,  my dance work is something that doesn’t really belong in a magazine. And I’ll make a book of it. The book doesn’t really talk about the experience of experiencing. I think the gallery space for me has to do with wanting to infiltrate that space and to have a dialogue between other gallery shows and artists. This is why I showed up in a lot of group shows last year in Europe. So many people have gone through these spaces in Antwerp where the dance work is featured and it’s made more of an impact than a magazine could. It was particularly important to be in a room opposite  Moyra Davey and to hear our voices bouncing back and forth against each other.

My dance work was made for the audience to witness, but it wasn’t made with an audience in mind like dance historically has been. Yes, the viewer’s gaze is primary, but their presence is secondary. I think it’s the spatial and social politics of gallery and museum spaces that excite me about exhibitions. With the new work, the idea of a room full of this community that is also a separated community gives a very layered viewing experience. With  8 Women, you, the viewer, know who you are because of who you are attracted to and who you think represents you. But a mischievous ambiguity is overseeing the whole room that maybe throws gender into question.

I’m reminded of an experience I had when I photographed this model, Andrej. I have to look up when I did it, but they’re now Andrea, and they were one of the first out trans models. I remember shooting them and thinking, “Who the fuck am I if I don’t know who they are?” Up until then, I’ve been a dyke shooting straight boys, or I’ve been a dyke shooting fags, or I’ve been a very cautious dyke shooting straight woman and barely any lesbians, or I’ve been a woman shooting kids.” Shooting  Andrej really fucked me up. I couldn’t measure my attraction because I literally just wasn’t sure who they were. They were so androgynous, but my impulse was to keep the characters male. If I saw them as a male, then I could understand what I’m supposed to do and what they’re supposed to look like.

That was early on, of course.  When I shot Hari Nef for Dazed magazine in 2014, I remember arguing with her because I wanted her to be a boy that looked like a girl, but that’s not what she wanted. We went back and forth about it. This year I shot her for Butt magazine, and it felt so clear that she was a woman. I could therefore photograph both of those identities.

DS

I was in a bookstore yesterday and saw the new issue with your photographs.

CS

It was so revolutionary for her, her transition, and my growth in terms of reception. A lot of that has to do with this idea of what a lesbian from the 1980s thinks gender is and how to communicate that visually. No, it was more like the dependence on specificity in the exchange that happens between photographer and subject. The Butt shoot was surreal because I was standing with Hari, who I’ve known for many years, who has become a friend, and who’s suddenly in front of the camera again. I see her as a woman and as queer, but not as a boy. She registers much more queer because she’s transitioned more fully. I think it’s really sticky, the word transition is complex. The language is complicated. How dare I describe someone else? That happens in the book, The AutoBody, right? I  dare to describe someone. Making that book has been very similar to working in the wrestling room. Both capture a community that isn’t but maybe wants to be seen—whatever that means.

DS

Is that scary for you? Do you feel like this project is different from others, or does anxiety anticipate every new project you work on?

CS

Well, nothing’s ever going to be as easy as psychically fucking up Germans. [Laughs.] That was bad in a bunch of ways because I was also seduced by the images that I was making. I also suffered from Stockholm syndrome, where I thought, “Oh my God, now I’m identifying with them.”

It’s really important that my generation is supportive and, indeed, set free by what the generations now are doing. There is a sense of freedom now. I moved to New York in 1981 and cut my hair off, which felt like a big transition. [Laughs.]

DS

You just came out with COSMOS, a book of drawings of Nicole Eisenman and self-portraits.

CS

It’s a conversation between photography and drawing because everything exists as a photograph first. I started drawing Nicole, pictures of whom were floating around the studio from two shoots that were published in T magazine and The New Yorker. I invented her as a doppelganger to get away from intimacy. When an image becomes a drawing, it sort of ebbs and flows closer and farther away from the photo.  As I edited old shoots and cell phone selfies of Nicole from hangouts, I realized Nicole and I shared so many worlds except the art world. She’s a painter. It’s a much longer conversation, but I loved the practice of inventing a nebulous space and existing in a nebulous time period. Nicole is also a companion I could talk to about presentation and notoriety. Sameness and difference.

DS

Do you think you’ll do shows out of either of these projects? Is that something that appeals to you?

CS

Perhaps. There’s a real purpose for me showing this work versus gathering a bunch of pictures that I think go together to sell and be in people’s homes. I think now that I don’t show with regularity, I can really just show when it feels like I fucking want to show. Like when I want to be in a room with all those photos or drawings or videos. I want to be in a room with those kids. I want other kids to be in that room. I remember I did a campaign for Saint Laurent and there’s a picture of two black girls kissing, and it was on a billboard in Los Angeles. I was thinking, “Jesus, that’s for the parents walking down the street. I hope they look up and they see.”  That’s the kind of visibility that’s going to be more impactful than if that picture was taken at a club and I put it in a gallery show. That moment was queerer than anything else I have ever done. Because it was so big and immediately and consistently impactful. I’m really interested in people who are living through being themselves. That’s one of the reasons I’m primarily photographing young people. Part of the premise of the AutoBody book is its new cars, new models.

DS

But so often the people you photograph seem like surrogates for yourself, no?

CS

When I’m taking pictures of people, I become them in my mind. By the end of the shoot, I do think I look like them. I’m sorely disappointed when I look in the mirror and I’m not them.