Norbert Schoerner


Norbert Schoerner is a German photographer and filmmaker based in London.

Career

Based in London since 1989, he spent the early 1990s experimenting with layered imaging and digital post production, primarily in The Face. His work has since been published in NY Times magazine, Vogue, and Another Magazine. His advertising campaigns have included Comme des Garçons, Swarovski, Shiseido, Prada, and Lacoste.
Schoerner’s photographic and multi-media works have been featured in numerous group shows such as: photo50, You Dig the Tunnel – I’ll Hide the Soil, Cities: People, Architecture and Society, I Shot Norman Foster at the Architecture Foundation, and JAM: Tokyo-London. The exhibition 'Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick' Somerset House, London featured a 360° VR installation inspired by Kubrick's seminal work 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Solo exhibitions have been held at Comme des Garçons, Chapman Fine Arts, SDLX and Museum 52. In 2005, Schoerner had a mini-retrospective at the photography festival in Hyères, France for which he created The Court, an interactive and site-specific interpretation of the very notion of “retrospective”.
Schoerner's book The Order of Things was published by Phaidon in 2002. He has collaborated with Jake and Dinos Chapman, and contributed to books such as The Impossible Image: Fashion Photography in the Digital Age, Apocalypse, Hell, and Beauty in Vogue. In 2010 he created a photographic essay for the Artangel commissioned Victoria and Albert Museum project The Concise Dictionary of Dress.
In 2011, Dazed & Confused Magazine's 20th anniversary exhibition highlighted Schoerner's iconic 2001 editorial collaboration with Alexander McQueen in the form of an installation consisting of floor to ceiling vinyl reprints. The series is also featured in the accompanying book Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along. A new monograph titled Third Life was published by Violette Editions in 2012. Claire de Rouen Books recently published a collaborative book between Schoerner and Steve Nakamura on the subject of food titled Nearly Eternal.
In 2020, Schoerner worked on the album cover art of Chromatica, the sixth studio album by Lady Gaga.
In 2021, Schoerner was featured in Wallpaper magazine for his AI art works that were redefining image-making. The set of AI generated images were then displayed in the historical Fitzrovia Chapel in London, UK. Schoerner's long term photographic project The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project was exhibited at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany in the summer of 2022.
Schoerner co-curated the 2025 exhibition The Face Magazine: Cultural Shift at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Selected exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions
  • The Face
  • The Farm
  • Tradition
  • The Order of Things
  • Flat
  • Kingdom
  • Court
  • Third Life
  • Nearly Eternal
  • Zeitraum
  • Gegenlicht
  • The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project
Group Exhibitions
  • Stealing Beauty
  • Tokyo-London Jam
  • Archeology of Elegance
  • Showstudio
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • Man in the Holocene
  • I Shot Norman Foster
  • Cities, Architecture and Society
  • You Dig the Tunnel - I’ll Hide the Soil
  • Photo 50
  • Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along
  • Vogue 100: A Century of Style
  • Daydreaming with: Stanley Kubrick
  • Never Ending Stories
  • Präsens
  • Beyond 2001: Odysseys of Intelligence
  • Beyond The Road
  • The Face Magazine: Culture Shift

    Publications

Monographs
  • Apocalypse
  • The Order of Things
  • Concise Dictionary of Dress
  • Third Life
  • Nearly Eternal
  • Pictures I Never Took
  • The Nature of Nature: Fukushima Project
  • PRADA ARCHIVE 1998-2002
Book Contributions
  • The Impossible Image
  • Dazed & Confused: Fashion and Art
  • The Archeology of Elegance
  • Hell
  • You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil
  • Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along
  • Vogue 100: A Century of Style
  • The Story of The Face
  • Jil Sander: Present Tense
  • The Face Magazine: Culture Shift