Collier Schorr

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.