Karen Knorr is an American photographer living in London who was born in Germany, grew up in Puerto Rico and went to art school in Paris and London. Fittingly, she has made a career out of examining the meaning of places: investigating rooms, houses and monuments, and using them to comment on taste, class, gender, art, history and literature. That sounds like an earnest business, except that Ms. Knorr’s images manage to be either wickedly funny or thunderously lovely, or both. In any case, it all began with real estate.
Just before the Reagan-Thatcher years, her parents moved to London and bought a maisonette in Belgravia, home to England’s crustiest upper crust and even to Margaret Thatcher herself. Ms. Knorr’s mother decorated the place in the style of the time, with chintz curtains, Georgian furniture and Laura Ashley wallpaper, which alarmed and intrigued Ms. Knorr, now 57. She began to make a series of staged photographs satirizing that upper-class neighborhood and its residents. (Clearly good sports, her mother and grandmother appear in one, looking aristocratic and smug.) They were mischievously captioned with declarations like, “A successful interior is one which aims for Good Manners and Abstinence.”
