Anne Collier

The catalogue for Anne Collier's first major American museum survey, and still the fullest account of how her studio photographs turn found pictures into instruments for looking at looking.

Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2014 for the exhibition curated by Michael Darling, the ten-inch-square hardcover carries fifty-five colour plates drawn from 2002 onward. Madeleine Grynsztejn provides the foreword; Darling traces the influences and thematic threads of a decade's work; Chrissie Iles, of the Whitney Museum of American Art, places Collier within photographic and cinematic history; the novelist Kate Zambreno writes on self-portraiture, collecting and obsession. Recurring subjects include pop psychology, the conventions of commercial photography, autobiography and the act of seeing. The exhibition travelled to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Collier (b. Los Angeles, 1970; lives in New York) photographs album sleeves, paperbacks, posters and magazine pages on plain studio backdrops, so that each source keeps its era and its sales pitch while losing its authority. Later projects include the slide work and book Women With Cameras (Anonymous) and the European survey Photographic (Hartmann Books, 2018).