True Stories New York (Pink), 2016
b. 1956, London, UK.
Lives and works in London and Almeria.
English photographer and filmmaker Hannah Collins's works treat the collective experiences of memory, history and the everyday in the modern world. She first became known for her large-scale photographs of evocative interiors and landscapes. These works often have a sense of moody abandonment to them. Collins questions photography's role of representing reality in a manageable scale. The huge scale of her photographs demand a physical experience as well as a conceptual one. The location of the viewer's body to the work also evokes issues regarding a relationship to geographic place. Her subject-matter is often views: the desert, the city of Barcelona, where she lives, or alternatively interiors that she constructs herself by lining rooms with such materials as cardboard or mattresses.
Collins photographs can be experienced as an image and as a kind of architecture, as a two-dimensional surface and as sculpture, and at the same time reveal the artist’s interest in the archaeology of urban space, showing how the built environment bares the traces of the past and the intimations of a future. 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.
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993, Collins was awarded the Olympus Award in 2004 and the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography in 2015. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and Toronto’s Power Plant, among others. Her work is in many international collections including the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; and the Luxembourg Museum.