Anne Collier

Through her work, Anne Collier engages the complexities of representation in a sustained exploration of the relationship between photographic objects and images. Often it features casually arranged, but meticulously detailed pictures of mass market and popular culture projects, posters, books, LP albums, and magazine covers that date predominantly from the 1970s to the early ‘80s. Collier’s focus on this ‘near past’ carefully circumnavigates themes of self-representation, portraiture, and biography, while addressing the inescapable, but unreliable nature of photography itself. There are no eye teasers, at least not in the cheap sense that the images clamor to get your attention. There is more of a sense of control maintained and a distance kept. Still, the feeling remains that there is more to the images than meet the eyes.

(Drawn from Jan Verwoert, “So How Come You Want to Know? – On the Works of Anne Collier, in: “Anne Collier,” publ. by Presentation House Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition “Anne Collier,” January 26 to March 2, 2008.)