Der Eigene Issue Four Works When Collier Schorr’s Subjects Keep Their Voices

Schorr’s consistent black-and-white treatment gives issue four a recognisable visual grammar, but uniform style can also turn a varied community into an aesthetic category. The short interviews are therefore essential. Questions about belonging, community and travel allow each participant to complicate what a portrait can show. Wallpaper identified figures including Amber Later, Chase Strangio and Shikeith without suggesting that three visible names stand for the entire group.

Nicola Kast’s casting role also deserves credit. Schorr described inviting people she knew, admired or encountered through different parts of New York life: a student, a boxer, a gym owner and artists among them. That method makes the issue feel relational rather than demographic. The photographer supplies continuity; the participants’ words supply difference. Coverage that calls it simply ‘Collier Schorr’s magazine’ repeats the hierarchy the format partly resists.

• Contributors: 15 portraits, not anonymous campaign casting
• Editorial structure: two photographs plus a short interview per person

Adolf Brand began the original Der Eigene in Germany in 1896, combining literature, art, photography and politics under conditions of criminalisation and censorship. It ceased in 1932 as the Nazi regime destroyed the space in which Brand could publish. RIMOWA and editor Luis Venegas launched a separate contemporary series in 2022. The borrowed title creates a historical conversation, not a continuous masthead or shared organisation.

That distinction is not pedantry. A luxury-company Pride publication has resources, distribution choices and commercial motives unlike those of a politically precarious journal. Issue four can still create worthwhile cultural work, especially when participants speak for themselves. It should not use the original’s risk as inherited moral authority. The strongest writing places both projects in their own economic and political settings.

• Original journal: founded in 1896 and ended in 1932
• RIMOWA series: a separately commissioned project begun in 2022

Wallpaper recorded only 300 complimentary copies, available from 26 June 2025 through BookMarc in New York, Andreas Murkudis in Berlin, Yvon Lambert in Paris and Climax Books in London. That distribution makes the issue scarce by design and excludes many readers whose histories it invokes. Scarcity may create desirability, but it is a poor substitute for cultural reach.

Our verdict: issue four succeeds editorially when Schorr’s formal control meets the contributors’ first-person accounts. It fails institutionally when those accounts are locked into 300 objects. A durable digital edition or library deposit would serve the work better than resale mythology. Readers should seek the credited voices, not collect the project as a Pride-season trophy; current availability cannot be inferred from its 2025 shop list.

• Editorial strength: portraits are paired with participant testimony
• Editorial failure: 300 copies make access needlessly narrow