This solo exhibition of 40 large scale works by acclaimed photographer, Anne Collier, questions how photography and media images seduce us and therefore affect our perception. Tackling issues of gender and celebrity, fiction and reality, Collier’s work invites her audience to reconsider how we see images and why. With a manual, analogue 4-by-5 inch camera, Collier uses traditional image-making and chemical printing processes to appropriate contemporary images sourced from popular culture—including album sleeves, magazines, books, Hollywood film stills and pictorial calendars.
Collier re-shoots these using methods to highlight the conventions of commercial photography, with particular attention to the effects of sexism as seen most clearly in her Woman with a Camera series: depicting heavily-photographed female celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Faye Dunaway, Jacqueline Bisset and supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, holding cameras. These works draw attention to the prevalence of the male gaze throughout media photography, and begin a feminist dialogue which affects the reading of the exhibition in its entirety, re-framing and scrutinising an image-making style that has grown with celebrity culture and become a staple in today’s media.
Anne Collier, until 10 January 2016, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON M5T 1G4, Canada. Find out more www.ago.net.
Anne Collier appears in our 10 to See in the October/November 2015 issue of Aesthetica. Pick up a copy of the magazine at www.aestheticamagazine.com.
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Credits
1. Anne Collier, Cut (Colour) 2009, Courtesy: Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Cori-Mora, London; Marc Foxx Gallery, LA.