It seems appropriate that I first learned of Anne Collier through an exhibition of photographs she curated, a series of photographs of photographs by artists she must have felt akin to in one way or another. Zoe Leonard, Marlo Pascual, Hervé Guibert, Judy Linn, Wolfgang Tillmans, all staged at a gallery in midtown I visited, too, purely by accident.
The sky had opened and language had failed me. I presumed language had failed everyone that day and panicked I no longer had the means of communicating what was never going to be communicable. I might have photographed this occasion – photography is felt and known as language gone sideways, it is an abstraction of the ineffable, it is a tangible marker of feeling, a joy or despair sometimes as mysterious in origin to photographer as it is to future audience.
This is to say I bolted into the gallery soaked to my socks with a dead phone, never to take a photograph, dispersed by a summer storm whose clouds did not darken in the faroff basin of lower or upper Manhattan. There was no thunder, there was no gradation of blue to intimate how water suspends as much as it extinguishes. It was a pallor of sky that struggles to understand what seasons are for, something I have known but seldom expect out east. Sudden sheafs of sheafs brought me to photographs of photographs and vinyl lettering: “I take pictures, photographic pictures, bright light, dark room, bright light, dark room, I said I’d write a letter, but I never got the time, and looking to the day I mesmerize the light.” Collier selected the exhibition title from a Depeche Mode song. She selected the exhibition as she excavates life. She travels to estate sales and thrift shops to pause before the syndicated image, what might be readily available in online archives but is individuated through pulp warped and weft by use then swift disuse. The vintage magazines are strewn about berber rug basements, the advertisements are a familiar recollection but never one’s own, the record sleeves tell us a bygone era is forever affective as it includes ball-point etchings, initials.
Collier photographs these occasions and eschews the term “appropriation,” or decidedly does not identify this as her pursuit when pressed. She photographs iconography as economies of desire, perhaps endeavoring to question the conditions that precipitate desire. What seems to have little rigor about it, a snapshot in time, a photograph taken off the cuff, what are those conditions and who are those people? Collier seems to say the human spirit will always round to, ‘I have never known exactly what I wanted, but I am summoned, closer with a camera.’
-Katie Calderon