
COLLECTION OF MARTIN AND REBECCA EISENBERG
Here is Faye Dunaway shot in black and white, holding a weighty Nikon to her eye, and adjusting the focus ring; here she is again, this time in color, the camera pulled back and uncertainty clouding her stare. The pair of prints—which show publicity photos from the 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars—are from Anne Collier’s ongoing series “Woman with a Camera,” which explores the power dynamics of taking pictures. Photographed on a plain white background, the text accompanying one press photo reports that the movie is about the vision of a woman who foresees murders and that it was produced, directed, and written by men. In Collier’s coolly expressive work, on view in her first career retrospective opening this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she exposes the sometimes sexist or sublime patterns lurking in popular culture. Using the slick mechanisms of advertising, she isolates old forms of media—photos, pages from books, cassette tapes, and record albums—and reshoots them. Her own photographs draw attention to the assumptions embedded in these artifacts, often about what it means for women to look and be looked at.
COLLECTION OF MARTIN AND REBECCA EISENBERG
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 33 under the title “Ways of Seeing.”