Richard Prince on Collier Schorr's 8 Women

"I'm looking at the PDF right now and Collier's emailing me about what I think.
I told you what I think.
I told you last month when you first sent it to me.
It's great. It's beautiful. It's the best book I've seen you do.
It's all there. All you've been working on since I've known you.
I love the drawings and how they interrupt the photographs of men and women.
That image of the girl putting on her sock... how the toe of the riding boot bleeds into the opposite page... Excellent.
And then I turn the to the next page and there's the first "nude" in colour. A woman. A girl. Small breasts. Buzzed hair. But it's the amount of eye shadow under her eyes that's the hook.
Next page?
Man? Boy? Male torso with some kind of collage pasted onto his cock. (Into his cock might be a better description). Juxtaposition is starting to cook. Something you can do only in a photobook. Already you've got the texture of pencil and black and white and colour and simple hand-made cut-up images and I'm not even half-half way thru."

It's interesting to read an artist's words on a fellow artist. Through his unique, instinctive language that forms the opening of Collier Schorr's latest photobook 8 Women, the reader certainly gets a good sense of the admiration prolific artist Richard Prince has for Schorr.

Born in 1963, Schorr grew up in Queens, New York and studied at the School of Visual Arts. She first met Prince in 1986 when she visited the 303 Gallery, hoping to get a job assisting him. "I hadn't ever had an assistant... and didn't really need one so I think she ended up hanging around Lisa Spellman who ran 303," he recalls. Schorr ended up subletting Prince's apartment in the late eighties and would refer to Prince's Spritual America work (already hanging in the apartment) as a perfect motif and inspiration for her life.

"It's great. It's beautiful. It's the best book I've seen you do" — Richard Prince

8 Women is Schorr's third photobook, following Jens F. and Blumen and it spans her work from the mid-nineties including her appropriated adverts from fashion magazines. Prince describes it as "a new 8-track photograph", featuring a variety of subjects, all of whom are involved in performance, be it as artists, models or musicians.

Text by Laura Bradley