“I've always liked how popular music can walk a fine line between
sentimentality and profundity, in ways that visual art rarely finds an
equivalent for.”
Anne Collier
Photographs are essentially documentation; here is an object
and this is what it looks like. The context in which it is placed infuses the
portrayed image with additional meaning that in most cases for the images surrounding
our daily lives includes a sales pitch. A sunset to sell a holiday, an artistic
nude to sell a camera or the glamorous lifestyle associated with the latest
consumer goods be it a condo or a pair of jeans.
American photographer Anne Collier utilizing the clarity of
hindsight de-contextualizes mass media and popular
culture images from of the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s. Employing a dead-pan aesthetic of a white and /or black
background she photographs photos. ”Like the white cube gallery space, these
visual devices serve to distance individual objects from their original
circumstances or context, creating a space that is somehow both specific and
ambiguous,” she has said.
The New York Times, Karen Rosenberg wrote
in 2012 "Anne Collier’s photographs of vintage books, album covers,
posters and other ephemera, taken in an antiseptic white studio, look
studiously detached at first. But after some time they reveal themselves as
sensitive and involved responses to an earlier generation’s visual culture."
Presented in a
still life format with often a ‘lived in’ feel, Collier’s meticulously arranged compositions reveal her
interest in the history of photography as an art medium along with an intellectual
inquiry into its meanings.
As she told Nottingham Contemporary’s Alex Farquharson “I’m interested in depicting different manifestations of
photographic imagery: how photography is employed in relation to everyday
objects such as magazines, record sleeves, posters, etc., and how these
mass-circulated things can absorb – and illuminate - our own narratives.”
A retrospective of Anne Collier’s work is on show at Chicago’s
Museum of
Contemporary Art until the 8th
of March.
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