Women with Cameras (Self Portrait)

Women with Cameras (Self Portrait) is Anne Collier's 2018 artist's book gathering eighty found amateur photographs, each showing a woman holding a camera or in the act of taking a picture.

Karma published the 168-page book in an edition of 1,500. The photographs, dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, are snapshots Collier collected over several years from flea markets, thrift stores, and online marketplaces. Each had at some point been discarded by its original owner. Shown in sequence without captions, they make a study of memory, loss, and self-representation built entirely from other people's abandoned pictures of themselves. Lynne Tillman contributed the accompanying text.

Collier's work is largely made of photographs of photographs. She re-shoots record sleeves, eye-chart posters, film stills, and other found ephemera to examine how images accrue and lose meaning once their original use has passed. Women with Cameras applies that method to a recurring subject in her work, women photographing themselves and each other. It followed a 2014 survey of Collier's work organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago that traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario.