Genii Loci: the Photographic Work of Karen Knorr

Karen Knorr's sumptuous composed `tableaux' photographs are the subject of this book, accompanied by three essays, the most useful of which takes the form of a conversation between the photographer and Rebecca Comay. They discuss aspects of Knorr's work, notably her interest in the preservation of cultural heritage and the ways in which the animal is separated from the human in museums. Thus natural history is separated from cultural history. Many of Knorr's images, illustrated in this book, bring the two together in a disturbing way ± apes wander around the sculpture court at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, stuffed parrots fly around the Wallace collection in London in front of Fragonard's painting, The Swing, a stuffed wolf enters an imposing library full of leather-bound books. Knorr's work is an interesting combination of the cerebral and the sensual. The rich colours and atmospheric spaces of the photographic images are constructed out of an engagement with philosophical issues concerning knowledge, visual representation and aesthetics, to name only a few of Knorr's interests. Perhaps I like these images because they appeal so much to the art historian. My only worry about this visual material is that, on some levels, it may be very difficult for some viewers to find a way into it and simply to take it on the level of beautiful seductive surface imagery is not really doing the work justice. Knorr's dealings with different sites where heritage is displayed are constantly fascinating ± the library, the museum, the stately home, the cabinet of curiosity all interest her. Classicism is a common element in all this, and she enjoys introducing interlopers, or outsiders, whose presence makes us see the traditionally displayed cultural heritage and its objects of desire in a different, unsettling way ± a black man strokes a white marble statue, a woman in an eighteenth-century man's wig reclines in the grounds of a country estate. Enigmatic titles designed to question as much as describe accompany these mysterious images, and a sense of quiet and of time standing still pervades her work. Thus an interest in history is accompanied by a desire to `freeze' it in a permanent present. Sometimes Knorr's images are `straight' photographs, and sometimes different images are manipulated by computer to arrive at the final construct. There is a strangeness about these images that is not really the same as Brechtian `making strange' and it is useful to speculate as to why this is and how it is achieved. There is also more to be said about the notion of the tableau-photograph, very popular in the last couple of decades, and I was surprised that the essays did not say more about this type of photograph and the contemporary context of Knorr's work. The essays could have been better, but the images are really interesting. gen doy De Montfort University