American Flag (Scratch)

1999 - Photography (Photography)

Collier Schorr

year born: 1963
gender: female
nationality: American

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap. A horizontal scratch cuts across his right pectoral muscle, bleeding at its end and nearly dripping on the uppermost stripe of the flag print fabric. The scene’s context is ambiguous, and it is never clear if Schorr’s subject is entering a match or leaving it. By stripping the image of those anterior narratives, Schorr allows the viewer to fully revel in the image’s strange juxtapositions – of bloody injuries and healthy bodies, of patriotic symbols and exposed nipples – without resorting to narrative explication or symbolic interpretation.


Collier Schorr photographs communities of people, from high school wresters in her native New York to teenagers in the German countryside clad in American military uniforms. Her work displays an almost anthropological curiosity, and in documenting her subjects, she tries to find the idiosyncratic details through which people organize into “tribal” relationships with one another. Her images, by extension, blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and fantasy as a means of representing the various ways these tribes identify themselves. Schoor’s work also investigates gender and the ways in which subjects use visual cues and embodied signs to both inhabit and subvert assumed gender expectations.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

In the Collage II (Marie)
© » KADIST

Collier Schorr

2013

In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop...

Horizontal Striation Scrap Lamp and Vertical Striation Scrap Lamp
© » KADIST

Jason Meadows

2009

The Striation Scrap Lamps (vertical and horizontal) although functioning as utilitarian objects also represent Jason Meadows’s interest in a certain kind of crafted sculpture...

Donald of Doom Tank
© » KADIST

Kristen Morgin

2008

Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...

Jeep Comics
© » KADIST

Kristen Morgin

2008

Jeep Comics is based on the second of only two issues published by RB Leffingwell and Company in 1944–45...

The Golden State
© » KADIST

William E. Jones

2000

His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...

Do Not Pass Go
© » KADIST

Jason Meadows

2011

Jason Meadows’s Do Not Pass Go (2011) depicts Richie Rich, “the poor little rich boy” of the 1950s comic strip...

Hercules Engines, Abandoned, Canton, Ohio
© » KADIST

William E. Jones

2011

In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines...

Holly Golightly
© » KADIST

Jason Meadows

2011

Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious...

Restaurant, Canton, Ohio
© » KADIST

William E. Jones

2011

In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street...

Killed
© » KADIST

William E. Jones

2009

Killed is a video projection in which William E...

Spaceship sketches of The Lemurian
© » KADIST

Yin-Ju Chen

2011

This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist...

One Universe, One God, One Nation
© » KADIST

Yin-Ju Chen

One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...

Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800
© » KADIST

Yin-Ju Chen

2018

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...

From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge San Francisco and Nob Hill San Francisco
© » KADIST

John Gutmann

1947

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works...

Extrastellar Evaluations
© » KADIST

Yin-Ju Chen

2016

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...