Hannah Collins

Hannah Collins, née en 1956 à Londres, est une photographe et réalisatrice britannique. Elle vit et travaille à Barcelone et à Londres.




If art once presented a window onto the world, modern art resolutely created a world in its own right. Whether through an emphasis on materiality and form or through the evocation of a broader social context, this tendency could be understood as an engagement with the real. The viewer has been invited to enter and become immersed in works of art that combine a symbolic reading with a phenomenal one.

While photography lays claim to the real through its documentary and indexical nature, few artists have been able to defy the pictorial limits of the image by dissolving the picture frame, blurring the boundary between the image and the space in which it is viewed.

An important exception has been the artist Hannah Collins. Her photographs can be experienced as an image and as a kind of architecture; as two-dimensional surface and as sculpture.

One of her earliest works pictures a room and is itself room sized. The scale is one-on-one. Thin Protective Coverings 1986, is a giant canvas-mounted black and white photograph of a constructed environment made up of flattened cardboard boxes. The image appears to continue the floor and wall of any space in which it is hung. Yet the solidity of the room’s structure is disintegrated into an overlapping mosaic of cardboard sheets. This remarkable image has a powerful sculptural quality At the same time it evokes the makeshift architecture of the homeless; and the unofficial structures of the favela. Imposing in its architectural scale and imagery, the work combines fragility with tenacity; ubiquitous, transitory, and disposable, cardboard is the mainstay of surviving life on the streets. The reference to ‘coverings’ also suggests skin, our own thin protective covering.

Collins’ evocation of the tactile, sensual qualities of the material world combines with her use of scale to give her photographs a spatial, even phenomological quality that to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss, locates her work in an expanded field.

There are some other important features of the photographs and film works. Collins is interested in revealing the archaeology of urban space, showing how the built environment bares the traces of the past and the intimations of a future. She also pictures the architecture of survival, documenting places created by those who have been displaced.

Juxtaposed with her photographs of buildings and cityscapes, there is an ongoing engagement with the still life and the beauty and interconnectedness of organic things.

Finally there are portraits; animated and speaking for themselves, through film; or, more recently brought back from the dead through found negatives or prints.

“Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through it’s surviving relics, the future through prophesy visible in the present”
(Szarkowski, John from The Photographer’s Eye, catalogue essay, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969)

Iwona Blazwick