Collier uses sly, ironic humor to point out subtle sexism in these found images of women with cameras
THE BOOK: Like a cross between Women in Trees and Cindy Sherman:Untitled Film StillsAnne Collier rephotographs photos of women carrying cameras, taking photographs, and generally in the act of capturing a photographic image. Anonymous found photos and vintage ads.
THE ARTIST: Anne Collier is a LA-born NYC-based conceptual artist who works in photography and is known for cataloging objects and images in her photos.
Women with Cameras (Anonymous) is a new artist's book by Anne Collier (born 1970), with a text by Hilton Als (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism), that consists of a sequence of 80 images of found amateur photographs that each depict a female subject in the act of holding a camera or taking a photograph. .
Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these artifacts of the pre-digital age were collected by Collier over a number of years from flea markets, thrift stores and online market places. Each of these photographs has, at some point in the recent past, been discarded by its original owner. The concept of "abandonment," of photographic images and the personal histories that they represent, is central to Women with Cameras (Anonymous), which amplifies photography’s relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. The sequence of the images in Collier's book follows the format of her 35mm slide projection work Women with Cameras (Anonymous) (2016), that was recently shown to great acclaim in Tokyo, Japan, and Basel, Switzerland.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Anne Collier: Women with Cameras (Anonymous).'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Bookforum
Lidija Haas
Whether concentrating hard or giving us the finger, they know we're looking...
Art in America
Anne Collier tends toward oblique and open-ended images that resist any simple message about the male or female gaze.
Featured image is reproduced from Anne Collier: Women with Cameras (Anonymous)—new from Karma and Studio Voltaire. Collier’s images “bristle with a kind of post-Freudian electricity;” Hilton Als writes, “there’s a pile up of ‘meaning’ that gets shown and eradicated at the same time in her pictures with their complicated underpinnings including the idea of ‘media’, and women in the age of mechanical reproduction: Are her female subjects ‘real’ or have they been rendered ‘unreal’ by the camera, that which edits so much of the real world out to give us all those disquieting image of women with dewy skin, flying hair?” continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 10 x 10 in. / 168 pgs / 80 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 GBP £40.00 ISBN: 9781942607700 PUBLISHER: Karma, New York/Studio Voltaire AVAILABLE: 8/22/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Women with Cameras (Anonymous) is a new artist's book by Anne Collier (born 1970), with a text by Hilton Als (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism), that consists of a sequence of 80 images of found amateur photographs that each depict a female subject in the act of holding a camera or taking a photograph. .
Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these artifacts of the pre-digital age were collected by Collier over a number of years from flea markets, thrift stores and online market places. Each of these photographs has, at some point in the recent past, been discarded by its original owner. The concept of "abandonment," of photographic images and the personal histories that they represent, is central to Women with Cameras (Anonymous), which amplifies photography’s relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. The sequence of the images in Collier's book follows the format of her 35mm slide projection work Women with Cameras (Anonymous) (2016), that was recently shown to great acclaim in Tokyo, Japan, and Basel, Switzerland.
