The eyes have it
Museum of Contemporary Art examines the work of photographer Anne Collier
Over a century ago, Eastman Kodak’s humble Brownie camera inspired countless folks to snap the moments of their lives. But family albums and Saturday night slideshows are ancient history, and today, it’s not just Thanksgiving dinner and that trip to the Grand Canyon that get the photographic treatment. In the age of Instagram and Pinterest, nothing goes unnoticed— or unshared.
Like the rest of us, artists aren’t immune to borrowing from the universe of existing images. Anne Collier, the subject of a solo show opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art this week, frequently focuses on material from magazines, calendars, posters and record albums. While the pictures we post generally say something about us, fine art photography aspires to something more. What that “more” is may not always be apparent, but as Collier’s work makes clear, there’s nothing to be lost in looking.
Embracing the strategy of appropriation (her sources include a Steven Meisel portrait of Madonna and a spiral-bound calendar from the Museum of Modern Art, opened to an Edward Weston nude), Collier’s eye scans the commonplace, teasing out fresh insights into our notions of perception and identity, articulated with a feminist emphasis. “She always shows the entire object she is photographing, never cropping out the context, so that she becomes more of a documentarian or really an archaeologist, plainly studying these artifacts,” says MCA Chief Curator Michael Darling, who organized the exhibition. “We get sucked into the image she is directing us to, but she works hard to not let us forget the original source we’re looking at. In this way, she never confuses authorship, and even in her titles, she lists the original photographers, so as not to cross that line.”
Every photo is in essence a self-portrait, a revelation— intentional or not— of our fears, desires, curiosities and prejudices. By comparison, straight-up selfies are far less illuminating. Some of Collier’s most engaging shots are those of her own eye, gazing at us from a developing tray or inserted into a paper cutter. These images reference her whole artistic enterprise, while at the same time they seem to ask, quite honestly, “What are you looking at?” Wondering what we see when we look at a photograph is not a new question. But it is one that bears repeating again and again.