Description

Karen Knorr – Questions (After Brecht)
Publisher: GOST Books, 2020
Hardcover, 88 pages, English
Size: 30×21.5cm
New in seal

Karen Knorr photographed the building site of the disused Parisian Art-Deco Department store, La Samaritaine, in the summers of 2017 and 2018. In this new book, the resulting photographs, transformed with solarisation and infused with playful fantasy and surrealism are accompanied by lines from Brecht’s poem: ‘Questions from a Worker Who Reads’ (1935).

Since the late 1970s, Knorr has combined image and text in her work—collecting texts and fragments, rewritten, edited, broken down, and ‘pirated’ from literary or news sources. Each question in the book, drawn from Brecht’s text, is presented alongside a series of colour-enhanced and manipulated images of ‘work theatres’ on the La Samaritaine building site. The ‘questions’ in the text conjure up civilisations and figures in history before challenging the reader with practical queries of their creation concerning labor, class, and power⁠—the realities behind human endeavor and achievement. These are matched by Knorr’s photographs of the iconic Parisian building, distorted and feminized with the extreme colors of retail fashion, while simultaneously revealing the cost and extent of labor behind the monument to consumerism.

The iconic La Samaritaine Department store was founded in 1870 by Ernest Cognacq and his wife Marie Louise Jaÿ who hired the architect Frantz Jourdain, a pioneer in iron frame architecture and Art Nouveau, to expand their original site. The store was closed in 2005 and has since been in the midst of redevelopment by its new owners LVMH and is being transformed into smaller retail units and luxury flats. Knorr was supported by a commission awarded to selected photographers by La Samaritaine, chosen by curator Christian Caujolle, and was given ‘carte blanche’ to make work on location during the transformation of the building.