Per Schorn

Marc Peschke about Per Schorn

It always starts with an idea, says photographer Per Schorn. That is not self-evident. After all, photography is said to be the medium of the instant, the golden second, the special moment. And of course these seconds also exist in the work of the Frankfurt photographer, who was born in 1978: moments of chance, of photographic luck.

Per Schorn is a representative of staged photography that follows an idea. It is the staging that makes his pictures – whether portraits or landscapes – so unusual. However, it is important to him that he does not negate reality, which, as he says, always inspires him. Music, art and films, he soaks it all up. As a young photographer, he accompanied the US punk band Ignite through Germany. He then studied design at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, including art photography with Kris Scholz, worked as a photo assistant and began his career as a freelance photographer.

Photography, says Schorn, makes the world more interesting. Alongside music photographer Gullick, he names US-photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia as a role model, whose famous picture of a man in front of an open fridge fascinates him: “I still don’t know how many parts of this image are staged, but it impresses me every time I see it.” Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Gregory Crewdson are photographic artists who emphasize the staged element in photography – which also defines Per Schorn’s approach.

But what is a photographic staging? It always raises the question of reality – that’s what makes it so interesting. What is truth, what is fiction? Schorn’s pictures also ask this question. Ambiguity and “dramatizing elements”, as diCorcia calls them, define his art. There is often a before and after, at least that’s what you think. His pictures are like scenes from a non-existent movie. There is an imaginary before and after in these virtuoso cinematographic photographs. The viewer is always puzzled as to what has happened – and what is about to happen.

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