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.