Women with Cameras (Anonymous)

Women with Cameras (Anonymous) assembles eighty found photographs of women photographed in the act of taking a picture, turning a private, repeated gesture into a study of who gets to hold the camera.

Collier sourced the images — amateur snapshots spanning the 1970s through the early 2000s — from flea markets and thrift stores, then sequenced them without captions or identifying information beyond the pose they share. The book was published by Karma, New York, and Studio Voltaire, London, as a 168-page softcover with an essay by Hilton Als, and preserves the plain, undesigned quality of its source snapshots.

The project extends Collier's long-standing interest in photography's own conventions and apparatus, seen elsewhere in her studies of book covers, album sleeves, and camera manuals. By collecting only images of women behind the lens, Women with Cameras (Anonymous) quietly reframes the history of amateur photography as a history of female authorship.