Anne Collier is a contemporary American photographer known for her use of appropriated images. By focusing her camera on existing photographic materials, such as album covers and fashion advertisements, Collier explores themes of irony, detachment, and identity within her art.
“Like commercial photography, I’m interested in establishing an aesthetic clarity but at the same time, through the nature of the objects I shoot, I’m equally interested in creating a sense of emotional or psychological uncertainty,” she’s explained. Born in 1970 in Los Angeles, CA, Collier received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and her MFA from UCLA in 2001.
A dominant theme of Collier’s work is reflected in her series Woman with a Camera, which consists of isolated moments of women taking pictures, including actresses Faye Dunaway and Marilyn Monroe. “Anne Collier’s photographs of vintage books, album covers, posters and other ephemera, taken in an antiseptic white studio, look studiously detached at first. But after some time they reveal themselves as sensitive and involved responses to an earlier generation’s visual culture,” the critic Karen Rosenberg wrote of her.
The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY alongside her husband the artist Matthew Higgs. Today, her photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, among others.
