One of the most imaginative photographers at work today, Karen Knorr's works combine a profound sense of place with concerns that range from the sociological to the allegorical.

Knorr's artfully constructed interiors range from the baroque architecture of the Chateau Carnavalet to the famously austere minimalism of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. Unexpectedly, these spaces are occupied not by the foreseen human subjects but by animals, roaming unfettered and free in playful subversion of the palaces of high culture to which they have gained access.

The animals in Knorr's works can be seen to relate allegorically to fables, which were created to relay social mores and often criticise human behaviour. Symbolic also of nature, these animal subjects create the possibility to re-instil the human relationship to nature that has been de-coupled with the evolution of high culture.

In discussing her works from the Villa Savoye, Knorr has said:

"The idea of this house is that it is a free-flowing space that blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside. I chose birds as the animal type to go into this building because all the work with the animals and these architectural spaces is about blurring the boundaries, disrupting the boundaries, or transgressing the boundaries between nature and culture. These birds [the crane and the magpie] formally echo the architectural space with their colour; they are, in a way, playfully formalist devices. The building is very clean - you can't imagine organic matter. The birds are unnatural in this environment, totally unnatural, like the building itself."

The boundaries of the real and imagined in Knorr's works are further blurred when investigating the layers of time present in her seductive compositions, which take contemporary views of antique interiors, positioning them in a timelessness which is set further adrift by the inclusion of analogue and digital photography in the same image.