Photographic images are ambiguous, polysemic.

This is Part One of a two-part interview. Part Two is here…

Introduction

Karen Knorr is an artist whose oeuvre spans more than half a century. Her use of photography has evolved continuously, resulting in a remarkable body of work that is visually rich, culturally diverse, and intellectually acute. Through it, she has established a considerable reputation, with exhibitions in some of the world’s most prestigious museums and galleries. Her work is published in a dozen monographs and has featured in countless articles in art publications around the globe.

Her practice navigates a delicate path between the evidentiary record of documentary and the introspective expression of the personal. While the images grow from lived experience they hold their subject matter at arm’s length, considering the broader phenomenon rather than an individualised perspective. In this way, they constitute a kind of visual theatre in which the people and places, animals and artefacts she photographs engage in critical dialogue with the meanings and histories they evoke. Meanings and histories that are not fixed but are themselves constructs that shift and evolve with the changing perspectives of cultural heritage and the social structures on which it is founded.

In this two-part interview, Karen Knorr speaks in detail about the context and concepts that continue to shape her ever-evolving approach to photography. Here, in part one, we look at the work made in the last century. This began in the late 1970s with imagery, often combined with text, exploring the dynamics of privilege and rebellion in British society at the time. The inherent entitlement that underpins class and wealth, and the burgeoning anti-establishment counterculture that rejected the societal norms that maintain the authority of an inequitable status quo. Her subsequent series continued to address such unacknowledged biases, questioning the way the hierarchies of cultural heritage and academia have privileged the white male gaze and ways of thinking. While integrating a range of conceptual frameworks – from post-colonial theory and feminism to mythology and animal studies – Karen Knorr’s imagery is never simply didactic. Her approach is intentioned but playful, drawing the viewer into conversation through imagery that is as elegant as it is thought-provoking.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

You are an American citizen, born in Germany, brought up in Puerto Rico, later educated in France and living most of your adult life in the United Kingdom. How have those diverse experiences shaped your perspective as an artist?

I am dual-national American and British, but I have never lived in the USA. My parents met in Germany in 1946, both working for the US armed forces. My mother, Betty Luros, had been a photojournalist in Frankfurt Am Main (where I was born in the American hospital). An ex-Red Cross volunteer and writer for The Stars and Stripes [the overseas newspaper for the American military] she covered the de-Nazification of Germany and the Nuremberg trials. My dad, Major Richard E. Knorr, was a Polish-speaking, first generation born in America whose family had lived near Warsaw. A lapsed catholic and briefly in the 1930s a communist, he became in his forties a successful international entrepreneur.

My formative years from the age of four to eighteen were spent in Punta las Marias, Santurce, Puerto Rico. In 1958, we sailed from Bremerhaven, Germany, to San Juan, PuertoRico, on a freight ship with animals and a catholic priest who held masses on board. I remember being woken by the crowing of roosters.

Our new home on 13 Villa Internacional was just five hundred meters from the sea. It was an open and friendly place – my brother Richard and I had a very active and carefree childhood. I lived in Puerto Rico until 1972. At eighteen, I studied photography as one of my electives in Franconia College, New Hampshire, USA, during the academic year 1972–1973 (Eileen Cowin was my photography tutor). I continued my photographic studies in Paris at the American College (1973–1974), followed by an art foundation course at L’Atelier, Paris (1974–1976), before moving to London, England, in 1976 to study photography at the Polytechnic of Central London [now the University of Westminster]. I have lived in London ever since.

These diverse cultural experiences have not only ensured I speak several languages but also helped form me into a curious person not adverse to taking risks.

© Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon from the series ‘Punks’ 1977

Early on, you made a series with Oliver Richon on London Punks. How did that series come about?

Olivier and I met at Harrow College of Technology and Art in 1976. A year later, over a period of three months, we took photographs in several of London’s punk music clubs. We worked collaboratively and co-authored all the works. This enabled us to control the lighting – flash, often off-camera – as well as helping us establish an easier relation with our subjects. We wanted to get away from the candid photography strategy of street photography – the ‘decisive moment’. Instead, we chose a direct confrontational approach in order to emphasise punk symbolism and make it more readable. The pictures are posed, affirming our presence rather than evading it.

These pictures are portraits as much as documents. It was important for us to ask people to pose, that they were aware of the camera. The club became a kind of studio, a windowless space in near darkness, the flash revealing gestures and details that were barely visible at the time of taking the pictures. Posing makes the portrait more picture-like, it involves duration rather than the capturing of an instant. And yet, curiously, the flash arrests time and turns the pose into a snapshot.

© Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon from the series ‘Punks’ 1977

What did you want to capture in these shots?

We wanted to represent a young generation that was rebellious and at odds with Thatcherite Britain; one that came together to form a new sound that challenged the music establishment of the time. Girls figured prominently in this work: Ari Up, Laura Logic, Palmolive, Poly Styrene, and Siouxsie were among many musicians asserting their female presence at the Roxy. The photographs celebrate their power and presence in a music industry that, until then, had been dominated by men. Everything was evolving so fast. Returning to the clubs several times over those three months, we found people had changed their look radically. It was a DIY aesthetic; clothes slashed and pinned, slogans drawn on to the fabric or leather.

© Karen Knorr from the series ‘Belgravia’ 1979–1981

Over the next six years you made three series that looked at a very different social group, the British upper middle class…

In the 1980s under Thatcher the upper middle class in the UK were conservative, aspirational, and often self-regarding – avid consumers of The Tatler and Country Life magazines and the aristocratic society portrayed on their pages. The work began in 1979 with my family and friends as a critique of the privileged class that I had grown up in. The first image was a double portrait of my mother and grandmother in the living room of our house in Lowndes Square. It began a series of environmental portraits exploring social class and the received opinions of the wealthy who lived in Belgravia, an area of London near to Harrods that’s home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

The work is autobiographical and uses humour in order to reconsider class and its prejudices. It focuses on social inequality between men and women as well as the aspirational values attached to notions of taste.

© Karen Knorr from the series ‘Belgravia’ 1979–1981

How much of this is performance and how much documentary?

I used a collaborative approach spending time with my subjects, getting to know them. I would suggest several locations in their homes and, once agreed, set up the studio flash equipment. We would choose items of clothing together, and I would move furniture around to allow them more space to pose.

In that first picture, my mother and grandmother wore their mink coats. It was a tongue-in-cheek gesture to status and wealth. They performed knowingly, complicit with the humour. The text underneath is a quote from my mother: “I live in the nineteenth century, the early nineteenth century”. Luis Buñuel’s surrealist erotic film ‘Belle de Jour’ is screening on the television. I captured the moment when the actors Pierre Clémenti and Catherine Deneuve kiss.

Each work combines image and text into a single photographic print, giving equal weight to both elements. Why did you choose this approach?

It’s an ironic juxtaposition intended to highlight privilege. I was aware of this effect between image and text, which had been developed by conceptual artists and photographers such as Victor Burgin (who was my tutor). But I was also conscious of the way the British class system was revealed in Bill Brandt’s ‘The English at Home’ and Bill Owen’s work ‘Suburbia’.

© Karen Knorr from the series ‘Belgravia’ 1979–1981

The texts are constructs. Arranging and posing the portraits was a lengthy process that could take up to three hours. During that time, I wrote down quotes from our conversations together which I then edited and typeset on lith film. The work was printed onto silver bromide paper using two enlargers, one for the image the other for the text. By consciously designing the two elements into the work itself I could highlight the ironic interplay of images and ideas.

One thing this work seems to share with the punk work is the sense of ennui that the subjects exhibit. Does this reflect some zeitgeist in Britain at the time?

In case of the punks, there was profound disenchantment and a nihilistic rejection of conservative values of the government, and in the fashion and music industries. Many of these predominantly white working-class young people were keen to break away from the norms of suburban existence. They were questioning their parents’ establishment views, societal expectations. The emphasis was on individualism and free expression.

The ennui of the Belgravian subjects was different. They were definitely in their comfort zone, waiting for their therapist or masseur and planning their next social event. I was their entertainer and portraitist. The nice girl next door…

[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘In the Green Room, Wallace Collection, London, England’ 2001 from the series ‘Academies’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Movement of the Soul, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England’ 1994 from the series ‘Academies’

Through the latter years of the last century your work becomes more overtly staged, more metaphorical. What led to that evolution in your practice?

Each series sought to critique the documentary tradition and begin to develop a new visual language. I was trying to reinvent social documentary by drawing on lessons learned from conceptual art while rejecting the anti-aesthetic prevalent in most uses of photography in conceptual art. I wanted to harness the craft of printing and the technical control necessary to achieve a visually strong and captivating image. To explore the potential poetics of the photographic image in which the narrative was primarily carried by the image itself.

To this end, I researched the traditions of European fine art painting; the way each work constructs meaning within the confines of the frame. My series ‘Capital’ was influenced by the vanitas and memento-mori paintings of the seventeenth-century Dutch still-life tradition. Made in 1990, this work was created within the square mile of the City of London, with architectural sites such as the Bank of England serving as the location for each still life composition.

[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘The Principles of Political Economy’ from the series ‘Capital’ 1990–1991
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘The End of History’ from the series ‘Capital’ 1990–1991

An example of that approach is ‘Principles of Political Economy’, which leads me to an allegorical reading of the image…

Allegory was interesting to me because of the way it is a doubling of one meaning through another more literal one. As an undergraduate I had been interested in semiotics – its relationship to the photographic image and broader systems of representation. But photographs are not simple signifiers with a fixed signified object or idea. Photographs are read differently according to context; they engage us according to our cultural and emotional background and knowledge. And that more complex system of meanings interested me.

Photographic images are ambiguous, polysemic. I definitely did not want to use allegory as a moralising device. My approach was playful, but within it ran a more serious vein.

[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Shattering an Old Dream of Symmetry, Osterley Park and House, London, England’ 1988 from the series ‘Connoisseurs’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Cast Courts, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England’ 1988 from the series ‘Connoisseurs’

You developed that allegorical approach in other series such as ‘Connoisseurs’ and ‘Academies’. However, here you turned your attention from private wealth to the more public treasures of the art museum.

In ‘Connoisseurs’ I was trying to find new ways of disrupting the museum space. I wanted to challenge the culture of English Heritage. I did this by introducing temporary elements such as a taxidermied chimpanzee, an obelisk, a woman appearing as a contemporary Diana the Huntress, an arrow piercing a 1985 Sotheby’s auction catalogue… These photographs were created in situ at properties managed by English Heritage, places such as Osterley Park House, Chiswick House, Sir John Soane Museum, and The Dulwich Picture Gallery. The series ends at the Victoria and Albert Museum in a place once nicknamed The Fake Plaster Cast Room. Here we find a man reading a catalogue of miniatures (my mother was a miniature collector). The finished work has a brass plaque pinned to the frame which, quoting Walter Benjamin, reads: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

The Cast Courts in the V&A opened in 1873. They represent the apotheosis of Victorian educational ideals. A space for art education where examples of great art (such as Michaelangelo’s ‘David’) could be appreciated by a broad public at a time when travel was limited to those with the necessary economic means.

To me, this work draws attention to the uneasy relationship between access and privilege. While the public is permitted to enter these spaces, view these objects, there remains a significant asymmetry between the histories that brought these collections together and the somewhat false narratives of public ownership they claim.

I began to think about private collections and how they were collected and arranged in private homes. For example, Chiswick House. This was not lived in – rather, it was a showcase for Lord Burlington’s Grand Tour collections, which were staged in sumptuous interiors created by eighteenth-century landscape and interior designer William Kent. But I was also grappling with ambivalent memories of my own home growing up in Puerto Rico – my mother’s library, her art collection and pre-Columbian artefacts. Drawing on these different experiences, I was interested in how the privileged space transforms into a museum. How a theatre for the private, usually male, collector becomes part of the national heritage once donated or auctioned.

These concerns touch on many of the ideas current at the time. How did that wider discourse influence your artmaking?

In the late eighties and early nineties institutional critique and postmodernist ideas were contesting the parameters of the white male aesthetic canon present in museums. At the time I was looking at conceptual artists such as Andrea Fraser, Mary Kelley, Hans Haacke, Michael Asher… at the ways in which their installations were challenging both museology and the institutional space of the museum. At the same time, I was reading Martin Bernal’s ‘Black Athena’, Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ and, later, Homi Bhabha’s book ‘The Location of Culture’ and Gayatri Spivak’s essay [‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’]… Meanwhile, Laura Mulvey’s seminal essays on the female gaze provided a feminist perspective from which to consider these complex questions. So, I was thinking around ideas of the postcolonial gaze, of alterity, otherness.

[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘The Judgement of Paris, Wallace Collection, London, England’ 2000 from the series ‘Academies’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘A Model of Vision, Anatomical Theatre, Gustavianum, Uppsala University Museum, Uppsala, Sweden’ 1994 from the series ‘Academies’

In ‘Academies’, made in the late nineties, you return to the art world, this time making more overt interventions in these institutional spaces.

These photographs were very much influenced by feminist and postmodern debates challenging hierarchy and gender. But this was also a critique that implicated my own female subject position as a lecturer transmitting my research and life experience to my students. I was looking at the link between fine art education and the museum, on the one hand, and women’s position in the fine art academy on the other.

This is particularly highlighted in a photograph I made while I was a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. In this image [below], I am recreating the legend of Butades’ daughter, Kora of Sicyon. In the story, she drew around her lover’s shadow cast on a wall in order to preserve his image as a memento while he was away. It is a mythical narrative of the world’s first female artist – perhaps even the birth of painting – recounted by men such as Pliny the Elder.

[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘The Pencil of Nature, Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, Sweden’ 1994 from the series ‘Academies’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Hårleman’s Anatomy, Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, Sweden’ 1994 from the series ‘Academies’

This series critiques academia at a time when you were working in a number of universities in Europe. How did this view from within help to shape your creative ideas?

The ‘Academies’ series was the outcome of my engagement with art students (of which the majority were women) across several British and European educational institutions: London College of Printing [1986–1993], Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm [1993–1994], the University of Derby [1994–1995], Goldsmiths College, London [1996–2002], and the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham [1999–2023]. Here, I taught seminars in contemporary photographic practice and its engagements with society and visual culture. I also tutored students on fine art studio practice and led group crits.

In 2010, I was made Professor of Photography at the University of the Creative Arts.

Here, we will take a break before returning in part two of this interview to discuss the development of your work in the twenty-first century spanning the architectures of Europe and Asia.

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She has exhibited extensively in solo and group presentations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Her work is held in many prestigious public and private collections including Tate London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Museum of Film and Photography (now the National Science and Media Museum) in the United Kingdom; the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Musee Carnavalet (Paris), Frac Fondation Nationale Art Contemporain Paris, and the Centre national des arts plastiques, in France; the Folkwang Museum (Essen) in Germany; Moderna Museet (Stockholm) and Uppsala Museum of Modern Art in Sweden; Archives d’État de Genève in Switzerland; the Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore) in India; the National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto) in Japan; Shanghai Centre of Photography in China; the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), and San Francisco Museum of Art in the USA; and Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada.

Her work has been published widely including the following monographs: ‘Marks of Distinction’ (Thames and Hudson 1991), ‘Genii Loci’ (Black Dog Publishing 2002), ‘Fables’ (Filigranes Éditions 2008), ‘Punks’ with Olivier Richon (GOST Books 2013), ‘India Song’ (Skira 2014), ‘Belgravia’ (Stanley/Barker 2015), ‘Gentlemen’ (Stanley/Barker 2016), ‘Questions After Brecht’ (GOST Books 2020), ‘Connoisseurs & Academies’ (Kehrer 2024), ‘Country Life’ (Stanley/Barker 2024), and ‘U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)’ (Trolley Books 2025).

Karen Knorr is honorary chairwoman for Women in Photography at the Royal Photographic Society, and sits on the steering committee of Fast Forward Women in Photography. She lives and works in East London.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original. Part Two is here…

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