Collier Schorr

American Flag (Scratch)

1999

Collier Schorr, American Flag (Scratch), 1999.

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) 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.

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Collier Schorr American Flag (Scratch)

Collier Schorr

American Flag (Scratch)