Collier Schorr has been working in Southern Germany for the past 13 years, compiling a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions. For Schorr, the German landscape is a map of her own history, both imagined and inherited. Combining the overlapping roles of war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist and family historian, the series (Wald und Wiesen) tells the interwoven stories of a place and time determined by memory, nationalism, war, emigration and family.
Blumen is the second volume of Forest and Fields and moves away from the figure. Schorr decided instead to look for or build arrangements in the landscapes and domestic and commercial settings of her much investigated town. If people appear in Blumen, they are merely props in an examination of how objects and nature create dialogues within the communities they encompass. Flowers are uprooted so as to become performers in the landscape; signage, plums, chairs and a plaster fawn are some of the shapes of things moved and combined to further detail the daily life of the townspeople of Schwabish Gmund.