Belgravia

Belgravia collects Karen Knorr's portraits of a London neighborhood's rich and titled residents, each image paired with a scrap of their own speech, so the work turns into a study of power told partly in its subjects' own words.

Made between 1979 and 1981 while Knorr was a student at the Polytechnic of Central London, the series pictures interiors and their occupants at a fixed, neutral distance, closer to inventory than portraiture, with quotations recorded during the sittings running beneath each plate. Stanley/Barker published the complete 26-image series for the first time as a monograph in 2015: a large hardcover of 58 pages, printed on heavy stock and issued in a protective transparent jacket, with an afterword by the artist, in a first edition of 1000 copies.

Knorr's own family lived in Belgravia, and the series' second image is a photograph of her mother and grandmother in their Lowndes Square flat. She followed Belgravia with Gentlemen (1981-1983), photographing London's private clubs; both series were shown together at Tate Britain in 2014-15, and Knorr's later work has continued to examine institutions, class, and power through staged and archival photography.