Anne Collier: Photographic

Anne Collier's first solo museum exhibitions in Europe produced a deliberately spare book: forty-two plates that show how thoroughly a found photograph can be made to give up its emotional programming.

Published by Hartmann Books for the exhibition organized by Stefan Gronert at the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2018 and by Nadine Wietlisbach at the Fotomuseum Winterthur the following year, the large-format softcover covers eleven years of work and carries texts by both curators, in a design by Doug Lloyd. The selection runs across Collier's recurring motifs — eyes, mouths, clouds, waves, record sleeves, magazine pages — rephotographed against neutral studio grounds so that the source image is quoted rather than absorbed.

Collier (b. Los Angeles, 1970; lives in New York) has worked since the early 2000s with the printed residue of 1970s and 1980s popular culture: self-help LPs, camera advertising, paperback covers, film stills. The long-running series Women With Cameras and Women Crying set women as makers of images against women as material for them. Her American survey, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with essays by Michael Darling, Chrissie Iles and Kate Zambreno, appeared in 2014.