I think there is this sort of conflicting obsessions.
One is kind of twinship and the other is opposition.
It's about people that look the same but aren't the same.
It's about boys that look like girls
or girls that look like boys.
Or boys that look like soldiers in arms.
I'm trying to create tribes of people.
And I think that's why I was so drawn to the wrestling.
You get there and there's this tribe,
and they do sort of look a bit similar.
They all have the same kind of bodies.
Their ears turn the same way if they wrestle too long.
And when you have this kind of twinship in opposition,
it becomes, I mean, it's a kind of a metaphor for this,
you know, for the Jew and the German.
German Jews thinking that they were the same as Germans
and being so different.
(upbeat music)
I decided to go back to high school and photograph high school wrestling.
I had never really seen my wrestling team
because no one ever had interest in wrestling.
And I was just really taken by the guys.
I loved the way the guys looked,
I loved that they were doing something that in a way made them small outcasts.
They were doing not a popular sport, not a sport that people watched.
A sport that, that was really difficult.
Particularly in practice it’s about partnerships.
And I just thought it was a really beautiful relationship that I had never seen before.
All at the same time I had heard about a guy,
a friend of mine I knew, who used to be a really big college wrestler.
He was sort of you know on the fringe art world
and we should get together sometime.
He’s been coaching me and kind of explaining
from the position of a wrestler what’s going on.
JON: Whenever we would go somewhere we would just
talk the whole time about wrestling.
And it was fun for me to try to, you know, answer her questions
because she would ask questions about things that were innate or something
I knew automatically from doing it for so long
but I would have to explain it and come,
you know, try to explain it to her…
she understands, you know, she catches on quickly.
For me, ya know, and I can only approach it as a woman,
but for me, from the outside
masculinity has sort of been depicted in very black and white terms.
There’s just, there never seems to be a,
a wide range of emotional definitions of men.
–Are you guys twins?
–No.
I love when I’m shooting wrestling,
particularly in practice to see two guys throwing some moves
and then being careful that they didn’t hurt each other.
You know pushing as hard as they can but then pulling back,
making sure that they’re okay.
Talking about how to do it better,
All that kind of stuff I think is is to me a rich,
a rich part of, of masculinity.
See, this is the classic wrestling guy.
I just love this guy—St. Eds—He won his match so fast.
And then the newer pictures are like this
I’m looking for introspection.
I’m looking for the moment before the guy goes out there.
The moment when he comes off
either exhilarated because he won or devastated because he lost.
I like devastation.
I like exhaustion.
I, I really like seeing someone that I know can’t barely get up
The thing about a wrestling practice is the
coach will really get every last bit of energy out of you.
And there’s a peacefulness in that moment that I really love,
to see someone who’s just used their entire body.
As much as you explain to someone that you want to
show all sides of it,
no one who lost wants a flash on their face.
–Oh, sorry..
But having a woman approach them is different.
I think most of the people in the wrestling world are, are guys.
–You wonna draw a picture from these pictures?
–Ya, okay, I'll do it if you'll make a trade with me.
Teenagers’ sexuality belongs to themselves.
If I catch a glimpse of their sexiness,
it’s a sexiness they’re playing with and they’re practicing,
but it’s not something I’m asking for.
I’m aware that it’s there,
I’m aware that other people might see it,
but I’m interested in the life I would have had if I was a boy
and this is one facet of it.
Gender, religion, nationality, they’re all sort of things that are in flux in my work.
Um, and they all build on each other,
this idea of you’re not sure what you’re looking at.
You’re not sure what you are,
you’re not sure what someone else is.
In the Helga pictures,
I set out to create a total portrait of a young man
using Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings as a template.
To explore how one defines someone in images.
And also using a description of femininity to describe a man.
You start to wonder with the Andrew Wyeth portraits
is it a feminine pose or is it an artists pose,
is it Wyeth’s pose,
is it Helga’s pose?
Helga reminds me so much of Jens,
this boy Jens, from Prague.
This was Jens when he was eighteen and a half.
And he was really quite similar in the physique.
And then he really changed here when he turned nineteen and a half.
He got slimmer.
You see the resistance of the boy Jens in playing Helga.
He’s playing this character,
and the only way he can pose in certain poses is
to know that everyone else knows he’s playing her,
that it’s not really him.
But you see moments where he forgets.
And they’re the poses he would call neutral poses.
And the feminine poses are the poses that he feels women perform for men.
It wouldn’t have been a successful project
had there not been an intense collaboration between Jens and I,
like both understanding we’re both doing this job,
and it was somewhat difficult and confusing,
and we had mixed feelings about it,
but it became a kind of ritual, like making these pictures,
and often we’d make the same picture over and over again.
There’s a notion of—I think—
that I’ve always had in my work of trying to get very close to something.
You know trying to create as little distance as possible between
the viewer and the subject
and I think that the level of intimacy that Wyeth pursued was really familar to me.
Fourteen years ago I went to Stuttgart with a German friend from New York,
and ended up in this small town and met this amazing family.
I kind of just fell in love with the whole family
in kind of traditional, kind of country family setting.
And I guess about four summers into the relationship
I started photographing the younger members of the family.
It really became part of, I think, the summer experience,
that you know summer came with picture taking.
And it was this kind of big thing that happened, sometimes every day for a week.
I started shooting Herbert when he was nine years old.
And he doesn’t even remember the first time he was shot,
he has to look at pictures to, to say, oh yeah that was me.
HERBERT: We would go to the forest and kind of play soldiers with the uniforms at that time.
And play hide and seek.
Schorr: Here’s Karin dressed up as a guy.
Everything was so fake there.
There was a girl playing a guy,
there’s all these German boys playing grown men
and there’s Germans playing American soldiers.
And all this clothing was yours at that point right?
Herbert: Right. Schorr: Because that is how I started doing army
pictures because you had all this stuff.
Herbert: Because of my army nerdiness.
Schorr: Yes, your army obsession.
HERBERT: I might have possessed like seven or eight U.S. uniforms
when I met Collier first.
We got the U.S. military uniforms pretty cheap at flea markets
because troops were leaving town at that time, or they were leaving Germany.
Schorr: But you always had this posse of guys
that for what was I paying back in the old days like 10 marks an hour.
Schorr: you can’t go to a lake with a bunch of teenage boys
and not have a plan.
You’ve got to have a plan.
When we’re kind of marching around the lake,
I may say, okay Herbert, you know hold Andreas’s shoulder.
And they’ll just kind of pose like that, and that’s a picture.
And it’s not a picture I planned, but it’s a picture I saw.
When you’re a Jew and you walk around in Germany,
it has such a hold on you.
And I wanted see it from all sides.
I always saw it from the side of you know the Jew who felt victimized,
or the Jew who felt oppressed.
And I was very comfortable in that role for many years.
But being in Germany for a longer amount of time,
my experience changed, my relationship changed to the country;
my curiosity about what it was like from the other side kind of opened me up.
So much of my work, especially portraits of,
of large, blond, strong guys is really about confronting a sort of Aryan myth
that terrified me as a little girl,
because I would read books like DIARY OF ANNE FRANK
and things like that and that was what you were scared of.
That was the Jewish girl’s boogeyman,
you know the big blond guy kind of coming up the stairs.
I mean I think all the boys really enjoyed playing heroes or playing good guys.
It was, it was strange to bring in the Nazi uniforms
because they were suddenly confronted with something
that they didn’t feel very positive about or they were afraid that…
to feel positive about.
And so I think those pictures have an interesting quality
that separates them from the other ones
because there’s a real uncertainty in their expressions, in their posture.
HERBERT: The German youth has some…
kind of um a torn apart relationship with this kind of stuff.
You won’t see a swastika anyplace because it’s forbidden by law,
it’s not legal.
And so besides of running the risk that
you can be punished for wearing a Wehrmacht and S.S. uniforms in public,
you are simply not used to it because you would see this stuff,
not even in museums.
Probably you would see it in a,
in a feature film from that time,
in an American feature film, not even a German one.
So many things are buried in the landscape in Germany.
So many uniforms and medals, and you hear stories of people
coming upon buttons and helmets in, in the fields.
And I think that I really wanted to flush some of that up,
to dig some of that up,
and to almost that some of these soldiers seemed to have come up from the ground.
So that if you were walking in the field and you saw a helmet,
it was as though the soldier rose up with that helmet.
And he didn’t rise up as the ultimate villain
and he didn’t rise up as the ultimate victim,
he rose up as, as just a guy you know, who fought, just a guy who died.
Um, just a guy who killed someone.
Schorr: I like the relationship between this current Joa,
this current solider with these Nazis
because it really looks like to me that
he represents the whole German Army that sits in the woods
and maybe daydreams.
If the forest is the pride of Germany,
then you know let’s talk about what actually happened
in the forest rather than just showing the forest.
I’m not making something that’s about the façade,
I’m making something that’s about removing the myth,
and then being left with something that is more human.
There’s not a single intention that I want people to walk away with
when they look at the body of work.
I wanted to make work that spoke to as many people’s desires as possible,
be it a sort of maternal desire,
or a fraternal desire…
the desire to revisit your youth,
the desire for romance.
For me there is no progress unless you put things forward,
unless you sort of unveil, you know, desire,
unless you unveil uh, repression.