Collection

In her works from the Museum collection, Collier’s art appropriates common iconic representations of women with cameras from professional photography magazine covers and adverts. The artist records these pictures with her own digital camera, turning them into minimalist compositions on white backgrounds. Thus, she examines identity and how the photographed “model photographers” actually seem more like attractive accessories for the high-tech devices. One example is a study from a Minolta camera advert: it shows Candice Bergen, the famous American actress and photo-reporter for “Life”, “Playboy” and “Esquire” magazines, in a pose which suggests emancipation and professional accomplishment, but unintentionally makes her prey to objectifying, fetishist glances. In her work “Zoom (Jerome Ducrot)”, Collier also points to how adverts aimed at male readers of specialised magazines often feature sexually-saturated images of women. In this age of mass transmission, Collier’s compositions dwell on the visual power of analogue photograph distribution in pre-Internet times, and also ponder how they are consumed in our digital dematerialisation era