August is the third volume in Collier Schorr’s Forests and Fields (Wald und Wiesen), a series that treats the photobook as a place of revision rather than a container for settled pictures. Published by MACK in 2022, the 104-page hardcover follows Neighbors/Nachbarn (2006) and Blumen (2010); it shares the series’ dimensions while remaining its own independent work. Its sequence draws on Polaroids Schorr made in Schwäbisch Gmünd and on work she pursued in Southern Germany on and off from the early 1990s, building a documentary and fictional portrait of a small town inhabited by historical apparitions.

Schorr moves among overlapping roles—war photographer, traveling portraitist, anthropologist, family historian—to tell interwoven stories of a place shaped by memory, nationalism, war, emigration, and family. August returns to those Polaroids some twenty years later, not simply to preserve them but to historicize the work and examine the devices of making. The book exposes the mistakes in trying to merge contemporary Germans into their past, and the distance between artist and subject, and between subject and costume.

At its most charged, this is a study of history moving between documentary and fiction, distance and desire. A German boy in a feather boa, posed after Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, underscores Schorr’s interest in the performative history of fetishism and uniform. Aware of the pitfalls of historical authority, she probes the space between identification and critique, allowing costume, gesture, and place to hold contradictions rather than resolve them.

For collectors, August matters less as a standalone picture book than as a deliberate installment in a long project about book making. Forests and Fields is part diary, photo annual, palimpsest, and scrapbook; its volumes expand and contradict Schorr’s oeuvre through re-edits that produce new views of the material. August is designed as a distinct work—debossed lined hardcover with tipped-in image, 25.5 × 30.5 cm—and its value lies in how it extends that serial thinking, placing the making of images and books under the same scrutiny as the history they address.