Scent of A Man

In Collier Schorr’s latest project Gender and Identity make powerful bedfellows said Aaron Hicklin. “I think that often people look at male eroticism as homoerotic because women are not generally the authors of male eroticism,” says Collier Schorr, whose new limited edition monograph. At surface, Jen F. is a scrapbook-style photo diary of a young man’s coming of age. The fact that said young man is German, straight, and blond, and that Schorr is an American Jew and a lesbian, is just part of the subtle dynamic that gives the work its tension and intrigue. It’s nothing, however, compared to the central conceit of the work—that Jens is aping the feminine postures of a German housewife who is acting out the fantasies of a middle-aged American man. Confused? Multiple questions vie for attention in Schorr’s work, but the ambiguities conspire to thwart pat answers or perceptions. “It’s so fluid and confusing,” admits Schorr, who considers the project open-ended, despite the publication of Jens F., which replicates her work with painstaking attention to the texture and detail of the original elements.

It is, of course, a time-honored tradition for women to sit passively for male artists, but to have a man sitting passively for a woman, as Jens has, is thrillingly subversive. It is also a mark of self-assurance that Jens agreed to participate. Reminded of Prince William or Leonardo DiCaprio—there was a window in time, probably the last breath of ambiguity, when they all had this soft, pretty expression”—she asked if he would pose for some pictures. Some time later, browsing in a New York bookstore, she came across a monograph of Andrew Wyeth’s famous Helga series—portraits of a German model that Wyeth painted in the ‘70s and early ‘80s—and was struck by her likeness to Jens. “I immediately thought that Jens looked like Helga,” she says. Inspired, Schorr invited Jens to pose for her as Helga for Wyeth. Although long admired for her photographs of suburban Germans youths—among her earlier projects was a series of teenage Germans dressed in the uniforms of the Vernach—Schorr foresaw potential pitfalls in a project that substituted a young boy for a German housefrau. “I felt weird about copying someone’s poses, and Wyeth was not really the most revolutionary artist to take your cues from, and I wasn’t sure who would understand Jens as a subject,” she says. “I found myself in this spot that I’d never anticipated—photographing women—so that the pictures of Jens, which seem like a critique on femininity, or an artist’s view of femininity, are further complicated when Jens is contrasted by actual photographs of women who were, at the start, fictional characters for both of us.”

As for Jens, Schorr says his own transformation is complete, and that she doesn’t anticipate photographing him again.