In the summers of 2017 and 2018, Karen Knorr was given carte blanche to photograph the building site of the disused Art Deco department store La Samaritaine in Paris. The resulting photographs, infused with playful fantasy and surrealism, were taken with a large format camera and transformed with solarisation. Published by GOST Books in 2020, Questions (After Brecht) gathers this work across 88 hardback pages, with lines from Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” accompanying the images.
The book’s approach lies in the transformation of the site through solarisation, which reverses tones and gives the photographs a quality distinct from straightforward documentation. Knorr’s images record and document labour in progress, yet the construction workers have exited and the building appears as if built by magic. Brecht’s poem asks who actually built the great cities of antiquity, who was recorded and who was forgotten. Placed alongside images of a building being remade, the lines acquire a pointed, contemporary edge.
Questions (After Brecht) is a specific project: a single site, a defined period, and a photographic process that keeps the record from settling into mere evidence. The pairing of image and text is integral to the book’s structure, and its interest lies in the precision of its conceit as it brings together an account of labour, erasure, and the myths that buildings carry once the people who made them have gone.
