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reviews Anne collier
Anne Collier
corvi-Mor A, london
24 noveM ber – 12 JAnuAry
There are some grand and canonical gestures in photography that seek to reveal the limits of its objectivity: Jeff Wall’s
meticulous stagings, Andreas Gursky’s digital manipulations, Richard Prince’s rephotographed photographs. Big portentous
debates about photography’s veracity, or the nature of its fiction. Anne Collier’s show at Corvi-Mora consists almost entirely
of photographs of objects that carry other photographs, and while they might at first seem to make a too-cool nod to the
granddads of the simulacrum, the photographs quickly open on a more fertile dialogue between personal experience and
its contact with culture, cliché and stereotype, all the while toying with the possibility of a contemporary feminist slant in that
enquiry.
Collier’s tactic of rephotographing photographs-as-objects does the critical job of siting those images back in the
everyday world which receives them – a personal or private world separate from the fiction and seduction of the image. It’s a
powerful short circuit: the creased, folded-out poster, Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel) (all works 2007), map-pinned
to the studio wall, depicts a young, 1980s Madonna in bed, blonde hair spread on pillow, eyes cast down to the cigarette
between her pouted lips. It might be a studio-polished product of the pop industry, projecting the alluring and unattainable
informality of the pop star, but in the slight act of presenting it as an object, Collier opens up a gap between the image and
our reception, occupied (literally) by a spectator other than ourselves, one often steeped in fan culture’s unconsummated
cycle of distance and desire.
It’s that distancing – a ‘delaminating’ of our proximity to these often banal photographic images – that invests each
image with a question about the identity of its viewer. Opposite the Madonna image hangs Folded Jack Nicholson Poster
(One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), a publicity still of Nicholson as Randle McMurphy staring through a chainlink fence at
the camera, but with McMurphy’s apparently handwritten signature in the bottom right of the poster. A publicity machine
layering fiction upon fiction, or an ironic autograph by Nicholson himself? Impossible to tell.
The returned gaze, eyes and their image, and the camera’s image run thematically through the other works. Women
with Cameras (German Photography), with its contrasting female cover models, might play as feminist comment but is either
too slight or too clumsy. And the casual Californian hippy nudism of the bathing girl in California Poster seems similarly
ambiguous about whether we should be cynical or seduced by its naive romanticism.
But Collier’s deft unravelling of fiction, document and personal investment finds its best expression in the diptych 8 x
10 (Jim) and 8 x 10 (Lynda). Two almost identical photo-paper boxes contain a stack of prints, of which only the top ones are
visible, showing almost identical bright blue seascapes. We learn elsewhere that this is where Collier scattered her parents’
ashes. What starts as an assured but somewhat secondhand rehearsal of the question of photographic authenticity and
Woman With Cameras
(German Photography), 2007
simulation is suddenly turned into a portrait of two people, their absence, and the presence of loss. Collier’s work reminds us
c-print, framed, 84 x 109 cm
(image size).
that photography may be a fiction, but it’s made into reality by the faith we place in it. J.J. Charlesworth courtesy corvi-Mora, london
Artreview 116
FEB_REVIEWS.indd 116 2/1/08 13:48:43
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