Norbert Schoerner: Third Life

Straddling fine art and fashion photography, the German-born, London-based photographer Norbert Schoerner (born 1966) has presented his work in many different contexts, from international gallery shows to glossy ad campaigns for Prada, Yojhi Yamamoto and Miu Miu, and magazines such as i-D, Harpers Bazaar, Vogue and 032c. Having captured the likes of Jeff Koons, Luc Tuymans, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Prince and Damien Hirst, Schoerner now has a hefty portfolio of classic portraits of artists to his name. Alongside such widely known works, he also maintains a more informal, diaristic photographic practice in which he snatches momentary glimpses from a hectic schedule, with images varying in scale from a puddle on the sidewalk to the side of a glacier, or from a close-up of a showroom mannequin to a vast stretch of empty desert. The first monograph on the photographer in a decade, Norbert Schoerner: Third Life gathers a previously unseen selection of these remarkable “sketchbook” images. Made over the course of seven years, they are assembled here in the manner of stills from a cinematic narrative, tracing Schoerner’s own journeys around the globe.

When he’s not in demand for fast-paced fashion photography, Norbert has a knack of capturing those blink and it’s gone, sunset moments where the light is right and the colours are wrong, in the best possible way. It is these images, until now unpublished, that are chronicled in Third Life, a cinematic narrative collecting together the unplanned snaps from Norbert’s photographic diary of the past seven years. Documenting his travels across the world, Third Life explores the submergence of nature in today’s digi-era of mass culture. (Felicity Kinsella i-D)

The photographer Norbert Schoerner hails from Munich, but has spent most of his life developing his career elsewhere. Primarily based in London, Schoerner has shot for both magazines (including T, The Face and AnOther) and prestigious fashion campaigns (Comme des Garçons and Prada). He has also managed to collaborate on a few books here and there. Now, he’s come out with his second monograph titled “Third Life”, a hardcover photo diary featuring peculiar and personal moments from his travels, with a slight bent on picking up juxtapositions between natural settings (deserts, oceans and lush forests) and completely artificial ones (mannequins outfitted in metallic Lycra, a severed plastic ear on a lawn). It’s a commentary on what Schoerner calls “living in a digital stone age.” (Yuri Chong T: The New York Times Style Magazine)

Photographer Norbert Shoerner speaks of Japan as a place where a different standard for artifice applies. He could, at the same time, be referring to his own view of the world as seen throught the photographs of his new book Third Life.
Accumulated over the past eight years, the images roughly divide into unashamedly digital snaps and technical large format analogue observations. Juxtapositions of images in the book induce a strange malaise as do interventions of imageless white pages. Mistakes and accidents are championed and corrupted digital files produce a sort of optical-static printed adjacent to healthy image counterparts. Reality and projected reality are inseperable. (Emma Reeves Another Magazine)