Collier Schorr’s *There I Was*, published by SteidlMACK in 2009, is a 72-page paperback that marks a deliberate change of medium. Schorr is known for photographic studies of a real and imagined town in southern Germany, where she probes photography’s constructed relationship to memory and history. Here she turns to drawing as a more exact instrument for events in the neighborhoods of her childhood—specifically the muscle-car counterculture of 1960s Long Island and Queens.

At the center is Charlie “Astoria Chas” Snyder, a charismatic nineteen-year-old drag racer, and his 1967 Ko-Motion Corvette. Schorr’s father, an automotive photographer and journalist, brought her to a local track at four; she watched Snyder work on the car. A magazine article followed, with a headline that now reads eerily: while Snyder was in Vietnam, his friends raced his L-88. By the time it was published, Snyder had been killed in action. The book holds his story and Schorr’s dilemma: he was there, she was not.

Rather than resolve that distance through reenactment, *There I Was* interrogates the photograph as proof of presence, territory, and view. It brings together source material—her father’s images, Snyder’s own snapshots from Vietnam, professional reportage—into drawings that trace one monumental trip from Queens to Vietnam and back. Vintage car-magazine articles and Schorr’s photographic portraits are set against these drawings. Based entirely on photography even as it challenges photography’s documentary authority, the project reads as an expressionistic portrait of escape, dreams, and mortality in a fractured wartime America.

For collectors, its interest lies in this collision of media and evidence. At 31 x 25 cm and 49 illustrations, the book is not a conventional monograph. It is a considered example of Schorr’s movement between photography and drawing, and a sustained inquiry into how a past can be represented without theatrical restaging. Its layered structure—drawn, printed, photographed—makes it a substantive object for anyone tracking the expanded field of contemporary photographic books.