Artmaking never fails to open new worlds to me, new ways of creating.
This is Part Two of a two-part interview. Part One is here…
Introduction
In part one of this extended interview, Karen Knorr talked about her early work addressing the asymmetries of privilege in the British upper-middle class, cultural heritage industries, and academia. Asymmetries based on wealth, ethnicity, and gender. Here, in part two, we explore her imagery of the twenty-first century, work which has expanded her horizons both geographically and historically. It is a creative journey that has taken her from France to the Mughal and Rajput architecture of northern India, the Japanese decorative arts of the Tokugawa shogunate, and back to first-century Italy.
In the work we will be discussing here, the ironic juxtaposition and symbolism of her early series becomes more allegorical. Animals take centre stage, but these are the fauna of fable, bearers of metaphorical meanings that subtly activate the historical interiors in which they find themselves. The concerns with privilege and gender remain, but more deeply engrained in the history of the interiors depicted and the roles these animals and birds carry over from local myth and legend.
Take for example the series ‘India Song’, which she began in 2008 following a life-changing journey through Rajasthan. The images draw on the Indian tradition of personifying animals and birds in literature and art. Loaded with meaning, the creatures in her images are at once outsiders from the domain of Nature and tropes annexed to the narratives of Culture. They inhabit palaces and temples, elite spaces where certain areas were strictly gender-specific – zenana (women’s quarters) and mardana (men’s quarters) – their presence disrupting traditional hierarchies of gender and privilege.
But the life of an artist is not a singular thing. A creative practice is negotiated amid the demands of work and home – a negotiation itself shaped by gender and privilege. And so, in part two of this interview, we take up the conversation with the very practical issue of work–life balance.
Alasdair Foster
Interview
As we came to the end of the first part of this interview, you were speaking about your progress as an academic, becoming Professor of Photography at the University of the Creative Arts in 2010. How did you manage the balance between your responsibilities as an academic and your role as a creative artist?
Alongside my university work I began exhibiting internationally in 1980. My first solo show was in Paris, immediately after I graduated from the University of Westminster. Later, teaching gave me a certain degree of autonomy from the art marketplace and a level of critical distance from the vagaries of fashion and ‘success’. While a student, I had had role models in artists such as Victor Burgin and Mary Kelly who were established artists, writers, and educators.
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Marks of Distinction’ published by Thames & Hudson 1991
[Right] © Karen Knorr – exhibition at Salama-Caro Gallery Cork Street, London 1991
As a woman, it was difficult balancing my roles as an artist and academic with my parental duties. My son Roland was born in 1991, the same year I had my first Cork Street gallery exhibition, and my first monograph, ‘Marks of Distinction’, was published by Thames & Hudson. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly active in the international art world with all the travel that this entailed. I was fortunate that my partner was an engaged and active parent enabling me to travel for my commissions and exhibitions.
I think it is important to mention the domestic context. For, while my husband Barry Shaw was supportive of my working practice as a feminist artist and educator, it always remained a struggle. Every penny I earned from teaching went to childcare. This caused tensions in our marriage which eventually led to separation. It was these struggles as a female artist in a white male-dominated art world that initiated an important conversation with my colleague, photographer, and friend Professor Anna Fox, and, following a panel discussion at Tate Modern, the formation of an international network of women in photography in 2014. Fast Forward Women in Photography promotes the work of women photographers while provoking debate and questioning the way that the established canons have been formed.
[Left] © Karen Knorr from the series ‘Belgravia’ 1979–1981
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘The King’s Reception, Château de Chambord’ 2006 from the series ‘Fables’
In your work of the first decade of the new millennium, animals come to inhabit the palatial spaces of culture and rank. While some are pets and very much a part of the ecology; in other images, animals and birds appear in counterpoint with their environment, like introduced species. It is a juxtaposition that has come to characterise much of your subsequent work. What ideas were you exploring in this relationship?
It began as a strategy to disrupt and challenge the space represented by the image. But I also wanted to point to the constructed nature of photography itself by blurring the line between documentary and fiction. In some cases, the presence of animals is naturalistic: pets are present in my Belgravia work – a miniature schnauzer sits alone on a Danish mid-century chair, a cocker spaniel waits docilely beside his mistress. I grew up with pets, mainly dogs, and spent my formative years reading the magical realist literature of Gabriel Garcia Marques. Our home was not far from Loiza Aldea, the Puerto Rican home of Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religion that originally developed in Cuba in a syncretic merging of the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and Spiritism. So, I grew up understanding animals on many different levels. For me, animals represent alterity, otherness. They are disrupters…
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘The Battle Gallery (2), Château de Chantilly’ 2020 from the series ‘Fables’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Ledoux’s Reception, Carnavalet’ 2004 from the series ‘Fables’
While there is a striking naturalism to the animals, I am guessing that, aside from the pets, the animals must be stuffed. How did you go about deciding which animals to place within a given space and how did you acquire them?
Photography blurs the boundaries between the animate and inanimate: a taxidermied animal looks lifelike in the frozen moment of a photograph. So, when I introduce an animal into the environment, there is an ambiguity… In ‘Academies’ the animals are all taxidermied – hired from a shop in Islington called Get Stuffed or borrowed from Deyrolle in Paris – carried into the sites, placed, and photographed. Within the photograph, the animals enter into a dialogue with the architecture of the space and the artworks it contains. But I was also gesturing beyond the space, alluding to Angela Carter’s rewriting of fairy tales in short stories such as ‘The Company of Wolves’. These latter-day fables employ gothic narratives to explore issues of feminism and metamorphosis.
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Annunciation’ 2001 from the series ‘Spirits’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Visitation’ 2001 from the series ‘Spirits’
In ‘Spirits’ (commissioned in 2001) I used taxidermied birds that I found locally in private collections in the Savigliano Piedmontese area of Italy. The cranes and birds of prey were all hunting trophies which I inserted into three sites in the town that shared a common theatricality: the Teatro Milanollo, the Chiesa di San Filippo in the Palazzo Taffini, and the Palazzo Muratori Cravetta. I was interested in the staging of spirituality in the town’s baroque architectural spaces. These sites were both places of sanctuary and opulent displays of power and wealth, subjects that I had addressed in previous series. While the birds may suggest the illusion of moving through these spaces, the works are forms of still life – memento mori, reminders of the transitory nature of earthly pleasures.
Have you continued to use taxidermied animals and birds in your work?
No. Since 2006 I have photographed live animals as I found the taxidermied specimens rather limiting. I have become something of a wildlife photographer and love the challenge of being immersed in each animal’s habitat. From 2003 onwards I had gradually begun to mix analogue and digital processes. Shooting the images on film and then having them scanned to create digital files, something which had previously been prohibitively expensive. In this way I could digitally composite the animals into the architectural sites. This was the process I used in my series ‘Fables’.
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘The Queen’s Room, Zanana, Udaipur City Palace’ 2010 from the series ‘India Song’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘The Joy of Ahimsa, Takhat Vilas, Jodhpur’ 2011 from the series ‘India Song’
As digital technologies improved in the new century, I stopped using analogue cameras, and from 2010 onwards, I have worked entirely with digital equipment. Working on the series ‘India Story’ marked the completion of the transition.
I now work only with digital cameras and produce archival inkjet prints. Most of my colour work in the 1980s was printed on Cibachrome [dye destruction prints that were more stable and longer lasting than older C-type prints]. But that is now a historical process.
In recent years you have continued to explore this relation between animals and architecture in a variety of different cultural contexts: India, Japan, Italy… How did you go about researching and developing each of these series?
I travelled to the locations in their various countries and read extensively about their history, especially the history concerning the heritage sites in which I was photographing… My scope is wide: Aesop’s fables, La Fontaine, Ovid… Angela Carter’s rewriting of fairy tales in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ influenced my series made the Wallace Collection
While preparing for the series ‘India Song’, I immersed myself in William Dalrymple’s ‘White Mughals’ and more recently his book ‘The Golden Road’. And later, William Dalrymple wrote the preface to the monograph of this work
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Awakened to Emptiness, Hosen-in Temple, Ohara’ 2015 from the series ‘Monogatari’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘The Journey, Hie Torii, Tokyo’ 2012 from the series ‘Monogatari’
‘Monogatari’, work made in Japan, has a strong sense of its very different cultural context.
I began that series in 2012. It imagines animal life and Japanese cultural heritage by drawing on Buddhist Jataka tales and Japanese stories such as ‘The Tale of the Genji’ and ‘In Praise of Shadows’. The work was made in temples, shrines, ryokans, and gardens in Kyoto, Nara, Ise, and Tokyo. I wanted to evoke ukiyo-e, the Japanese art of screen painting of the Edo period [1603–1868].
The animals and women wearing traditional kimonos suggest folktales of supernatural beings such as kami, Shinto spirits depicted in the ‘Kaidan’ book of ghost stories. These mythical beings have distinct characteristics. Yūrei, for example, are ghosts or spirits, often associated with strong emotions or unfinished business. Meanwhile Yōkai are supernatural creatures that might appear monstrous, or in human or animal guise, or even as inanimate objects come to life.
I notice that in particular the crane appears in a number of your images in this series…
The red crowned crane features in the myths and legends in Taoism – a symbol of longevity. It is a common subject for screen and scroll paintings from the Edo period. (And, of course, more recently it has been adopted as the emblem of Japan Airlines.)
© Anna Fox and Karen Knorr from the series ‘U.S. Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)’
[Left] ‘Gifford, Florida’ 2024; [Centre] ‘New house, Lubec, Maine’ 2023; [Right] ‘Fort Pierce, Florida’ 2024
The arc of your oeuvre spans from Britain’s Winter of Discontent through to the increasingly turbulent present day, with all the socio-cultural, geo-political, and art-theoretical changes that have occurred in that time. How much have these external changes affected the way you work?
In 2016, I decided to stretch the parameters of my photographic practice and work collaboratively once more, something I had not done since the early 1980s. The collaboration is with my close friend, colleague, and photographer Anna Fox. We both wanted to engage with photography using our iPhones and digital SLR equipment. This co-authored project builds on our concerns about women in photography and the way in which women photographers are neglected or hidden from view. It was part of an ongoing conversation we had been having as professors at the University for the Creative Arts where we had both taught for over twenty years. We noticed that although our courses and classrooms were predominantly filled with women, those women seemed absent from the photographic scene years later. A concern that had led us to set up the research group Fast Forward Women in Photography that I spoke about earlier.
We chose the road trip genre as one that is still almost wholly dominated by men – something that David Campany’s book ‘The Open Road’ [Aperture 2013] made abundantly clear. Our long-term collaborative project – ‘US Route 1 (After Berenice Abbott)’ – sets out to challenge this stereotype.
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Zeus Disguised, House of the Black Salon, Herculaneum’ 2023 from the series ‘Scavi’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Syrinx’s Suitor, Villa Oplontis, Torre Annunziata’ 2024 from the series ‘Scavi’
You are currently working on ‘Scavi’, set in the archaeological sites excavated around Naples.
This series is still in process. It began in 2023 with a wedding invitation to Puglia followed by a trip to Ravello on the Amalfi coast and the archaeological sites in the region. Later that year I made a return visit with my son, Roland Shaw, and again in 2024 with my husband, Geoff Blight.
Scavi is an Italian word meaning excavation. The series explores myth and legend from Greek and Roman Antiquity, traces of which are found in the painted murals of archaeological heritage sites in the Bay of Naples. In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius famously erupted, covering and preserving the cities of Herculaneum, Torre Annunziata, Pompeii. Today, following extensive excavation, these are now World Heritage Sites visited by millions each year.
[Left] © Karen Knorr ‘Hera’s Eyes, Oplontis Villa, Torre Annuziata’ 2024 from the series ‘Scavi’
[Right] © Karen Knorr ‘Bacchus in Attendance, House of Neptune and Amphitrite, Herculaneum’ 2024 from the series ‘Scavi’
How do the animals relate to, or resonate with, the spaces in which they appear?
These are symbolic elements through which to explore themes of culture, myth and belief. I wanted to highlight the divide between nature and culture while revealing the transience and fragility of both human and animal life alike. The eruption of Vesuvius not only preserved buildings and artefacts but captured poignant moments in that ancient city life. Plaster casts made from the hollow voids left by the bodies of victims in the volcanic ash reveal the presence of both animals and people, highlighting the close bonds between humans and animals at that time. These were not only domestic animals, but also more exotic creatures kept by wealthy residents – monkeys, parrots, leopards, lions – symbols of status and prestige. In ‘Scavi’ these animals reappear as reminders of the interplay between history and modernity, myth and reality.
The bodies of work we have been discussing span six decades. In that time, what have you come to learn about yourself?
Artmaking never fails to open new worlds to me, new ways of creating. And I have come to understand just how much travel stimulates and enriches my practice.
As I get older, I continue to challenge myself and learn new ways of working. I have been incredibly fortunate to have family, friends, and colleagues in the photography and art worlds that encourage me to continue the constant experimentation. Currently I am testing my skills with AI, which are improving as I write…
Biographical Notes
Karen Knorr was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, in 1954. She has dual USA and UK nationality. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours from the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) in 1980, and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Derby in 1990. She is currently Professor Emerita of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK. In 2018 she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
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.
This interview is a Talking Pictures original.
It is Part Two of a two-part interview. Part One is here…