That sense of fragility also extends to the precariousness of the moments the Polaroids capture, with many of these visions of youthful bliss taking place as people paddle across a lake on kayaks or lie naked in the grass; there’s a sense of the scenes existing outside of time and place, even as you are abruptly drawn back to the stark reality of their historical context through shots of a military jacket or cargo pants. The ambiguous, alluring beauty of Schorr’s work hinges on its ability to evoke two things at once, as in her famous series on high school wrestlers, where the tension between these totemic figures of American masculinity and a more subversive, homoerotic subtext is as interesting as the image itself. Here, it’s the innocence of her subjects in the brief, full flush of youth, yet set against the backdrop of a more menacing history.
Equally striking is Schorr’s eye for using clothes—and more specifically uniforms, here studied with an intensity that borders on the fetishistic—as a storytelling device, many years before she became one of the world’s most internationally renowned fashion photographers. “I think I’ve always seen clothing as a fantastic lie, as the thing that can make something look like something else,” she says. While Schorr made her first venture into fashion photography thanks to a commission from Olivier Zahm’s Purple magazine in 2005, she notes that even before then, she’d arrive to shoot the kids in Schwäbisch Gmünd with boxes of clothing for them to war. “I would think about my early days of going shopping on Christopher Street and buying Levi’s and handkerchiefs, and these things that were part of the semiotics of homosexual iconography, so it was a really easy step over into military clothing, because that was a big part of it too,” she adds.
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