Questions (After Brecht) (Hardback)

During the summers of 2017 and 2018, Karen Knorr was

given a carte blanche to photograph the building site

of the disused Art-Deco Department store in Paris, La

Samaritaine. The resulting photographs, infused with

playful fantasy and surrealism, were taken with a large

format camera and transformed with solarization.

They are accompanied by lines from Brecht’s poem:

Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935). These

photographs record and document a labour in

progress, yet the construction workers have exited and

the building is built as if by magic.