Eponanonymous

Anne Collier’s solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery consists of 13 large c-prints in the main gallery and a slide show work in the rear space.  It is clean and focused, and it brings together examples of the different kinds of images she has produced in recent years, including album covers, open books, developing trays, and multiple magazine covers.  The depicted content of the photographs and the pictorial strategies involved in producing them perform a delicate dance around the issue of investing meaning in, and extracting it from, the photographic object.

Stylistically, Collier crafts these images with very clean, in focus, centralized spaces.  The color is clear and realistic, the light flat, the depth shallow.  All of these qualities point towards an “objective” approach to the content.  (Or, to be rather more “wink knowingly” about it, they “signify” objectivity.)  The consistent range of print size (around 40 x 60 inches, with some variation) and the same white frames further enforces the effect of neutralizing and cataloging the subjects in the photographs.

Anne Collier / Open Book #1 (Crepuscules), 2009 / c-print / 44 x 59 inches

And what of that content, and its alchemy with “pictorial strategies”?  There are two main actions at work, and they are closely related:  one is to hold the subjects at arm’s length, to force a conceptual, psychological, and emotional distance into the shallow visual space of the photo; and the other is to stake a claim to the found source material as being one’s own, to make it okay to invest personal attachment into visual elements already pressed ultra-thin by the twin forces of mass reproduction and cultural cliche.

[Non-trivially, maybe I have the order of those two actions reversed.  That strikes me as a question for each viewer to answer individually.]

The distancing strategies are more immediate (ironically) and need a closer look.  The “arm’s length” principle is a metaphor made flesh in the “Open Book” images like the one above.  Here we see two arms holding open a book to a spread that features a sunset photo on the right side.[*1]   The plunging space of the landscape, and its saturated color set against the overall pale tone of the photograph, gives the sunset some emotional force.   But the formal set up of the image is already working against it.  Right away we register the fact that Collier’s photograph is a picture of hands holding a book with a sunset image, and not exactly a sunset image itself.  This “not-exactly” is a barrier that protects Collier, and the viewer, from having to own up to the consequences of the re-pictured subject and its myriad cultural associations.  It’s an inoculation against the emptiness of kitsch and cliche.

These strategies and ambitions are well-deployed in this exhibition, but they are also widespread in photography today.  The switchback towards emotional desire in Collier’s work is what makes it stand out.

One can sense an unpleasant anxiety among younger photographers today, in which they see themselves as being forced to choose between honoring their urge to get out there and make meaningful pictures of their world, on the one hand, and respecting the realizations and principles of the post-everything media world that clearly circumscribes the professionalized domain of fine art.  Ugh, I hate to make it sound like that, but it seems true:  in the knowing, visually informed world of professional image viewers, who has the inclination to be seduced by a sunset photograph?  Well okay, one says, the sunset is SO cliche, it’s an obvious no-no; but once the thought process sets in, what subject can arrest its advance?  The image-qua-image gets swallowed up by professional impossibility.

But generally, people don’t become artists because they feel the passionate need to tell a story of professional detachment.  The original thirst for meaning is still present, and navigating their practice back in touch with it is a challenge.  I can’t speak at all to Anne Collier’s personal motivation or intentions; I don’t know her personally nor have I read anything about her on this point.  But the clarity within her images belies a tenuous network of hopeful possibilities that connect her subjects:  the open (and unblinking) eye, developing in the tray (or cut in half, a la Dali and Buñuel); the media depictions of women and their cameras, and the feminist reversal embodied there; Judy Garland, and her tragic superficiality; the highly constructed tableau of an album cover, and the way the music within can bear so much personal meaning.

The fact that this particular exhibition draws its images from a range of Collier’s types of images struck me at first as a shortcoming.  There is something dispersed about this selection.  But on further reflection this dispersal seems like a strength, because it hews more closely to the lived sense we have that meaning is assembled from constellations of incompletely accessed experiences.  Trace amounts, able to penetrate the layers of separation.  But with open eyes, they’re there, to be collated, bookmarked, and developed.