Collier Schorr’s 8 Women, published by MACK in April 2014, brings together photographs made from the mid-1990s to the time of publication. The subjects are women involved in performance—artists, models, musicians—and the book treats the photographic encounter not as a neutral record but as a charged, negotiated exchange.

Schorr’s earliest works used appropriated advertisements from fashion magazines to address authorship and desire, introducing a female gaze into debates about female representation. Appropriation was her first medium, and in 8 Women she returns to it, folding her own commissioned fashion images into a dialogue with other pictures. The result is not a conventional fashion portfolio but a layered inquiry into how images of women are made, circulated, and desired.

The sets Schorr created for these photographs doubled as her studio. Having worked in fashion for a decade, she used those conditions to draw out images that depended on a subject able to move between object of desire and enforcer of an identity crafted in the moment. Working between out-takes and manipulations of tear sheets, she asks who the women who desire to be looked at are, and what power lies in acknowledging that as a post-feminist position.

For a collector, the book’s value lies in this sustained argument rather than in any single image. It connects early appropriation, commissioned fashion work, and the raw evidence of the studio into a single project about looking and authorship. Schorr does not resolve the contradictions between desire, performance, and control; she keeps them visible. That makes 8 Women an important record of a photographer thinking through the terms of her own practice, and a considered addition to a collection attentive to feminist and post-feminist photography.