Karen Knorr

Karen Knorr goes where cultures have put their pride on the walls: the palaces and temples of India and Japan, the frescoed houses and villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum. She photographs these rooms as they are, and asks what they were built to say, and to whom. Then she brings in the animals. Each is photographed separately and placed in the picture with care, a swan in a frescoed bedroom, a leopard before a mosaic, until an old myth or fable is playing out again, in the present tense, in a room where it was never meant to happen. Knorr calls herself a storyteller. The camera is how she retells the stories a heritage likes to tell about itself, and finds the ones it has left untold.