Anne Collier, Woman Crying

In her “Woman Crying“ series, Anne Collier captures close-up images of tear-stained pages torn from magazines often featuring celebrities and models in a state of distress.These evocative photographs prompt viewers to reflect on the power of tears as both genuine expressions of human emotion and carefully constructed representations in the media. Collier’s work invites us to question the authenticity of tears in contemporary culture and raises profound questions about the intersection of public and private emotions in an image-saturated world.

Anne Collier is an American photographer and artist known for her conceptual artworks that critique and comment on the representation of women in popular culture. Born in 1970 in California, Collier has established herself as one of the leading feminist artists of her generation. Her photographs often appropriate images from popular culture, such as album covers, advertisements, and magazines, and re-contextualize them in a way that challenges our assumptions about gender, power, and representation. For example, in her series “Women with Cameras,” Anne Collier reproduces images of women from vintage magazines and ads and places them within a contemporary context. The result is a powerful commentary on the ongoing struggle for female empowerment and representation. Collier’s artwork is also notable for its use of deadpan humor, which she employs to disarm the viewer and to create a sense of distance between the image and the viewer. Through this approach, Anne Collier invites the viewer to reflect on their own attitudes towards women and their representation in the media. Another significant aspect of Collier’s artworks is her use of color, which she employs to create a sense of nostalgia and to evoke the past. Her photos often feature bright, vivid hues that are reminiscent of the technicolor era of the 1950s and 1960s. This serves to highlight the disconnect between the representation of women in popular culture and the reality of their lived experiences. Anne Collier has been the subject of solo exhibitions at important institutions including The Modern Institute (Glasgow), Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Nottingham Contemporary (United Kingdom) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Her photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Modern (London), among others. Anne Collier was born in Los Angeles in 1970.

Anne Collier, Woman Crying