Images of Images: Notes on Anne Collier’s and Kotama Bouabane’s photo practices

Abstract

Photography, since its very beginning, has been self-reflexive, with photos and cameras themselves becoming subject matter for further forays into imagemaking. Recent works by Anne Collier (b. Los Angeles, lives in New York) and Kotama Bouabane (b. Pakse, Laos; lives in Toronto) recall this history while making visible the ways in which culture and gender are appropriated and commodified within photography. particular, Collier and Bouabane make visual inquiries into the dissemination ubiquitous photographic instruments marketing, production, and ultimately consumerism. Through the construction, circulation, and recontextualization photographic advertisements and manuals, both artists challenge the ways in which we see and consume various media. Although they have very different approaches to image production, both photographers address subjects germane to the world photography while simultaneously questioning cliches and tropes within that sphere. (1) Collier's series Woman With A Camera (2006-present) depicts, as the title suggests, photographic ephemera in which various women are positioned with an assortment lens-based apparatuses. Woman With Cameras #1 and #2 (both 2012) introduces a headless, sprawling female nude whose anatomy is peppered by Contax, Olympus, Pentax, and Bronica cameras. Her body stretches over a full magazine spread and is truncated by the fold the spine with the foregrounded cameras intimately hovering over her reclining figure. This kind tropic depiction reappears in Zoom, 1978 (printed 2009), which likewise features a headless, lounging female clothed in nothing more than thigh-high stockings and gold high heels. Here, however, the female subject is bionic, as a large camera is propped on top her neck. With one hand she adjusts her Cyclops-like oculus and with the other she seems at the ready to release the shutter, as if to say she is recording us as much as we are visually consuming her. The same exchange between subject and viewer is rendered by Woman With A Camera (Postcard. Verso Recto) (2013). A mostly nude female adorned by an assortment shell and beaded jewelry leans slightly to the right as she points her camera at something or someone out the viewer's sightline. Coillier has paired the National Geographic-like postcard image with an image its blank recto. Written across the barrier that demarcates the typical postcard spaces used for addresses and messages is the caption A. Real Photograph. The postcard also tells us that this image, tided Say Cheese before I click. (Turkana Girl), is from the Edition East Africa, 1312. Rather than doctoring, cropping, or altering these images, Collier simply re-documents readily available materials. Shot against stark, white backgrounds, the magazines, postcards, advertisements, and other objects that appear in the Woman With A Camera series are shown as is. This directness should not be confused with neutrality. In these and others their type, Collier has mined a rich vein irony in which women's bodies and phallic cameras become intertwined in a misogynist system that is as consistent as it is extensive. (2) While several works in the series might challenge the cliche passive female subjects as consumable objects, these images still seem to depict deeper photographic tensions. Woman with a Camera (diptych) (2006), for instance. pictures publicity stills from the 1978 thriller Eyes Laura Mars (directed by Irvin Kershner), in which a fashion photographer, played by Fave Dunaway, develops the ability to see through the eyes a killer, through the lens her camera. Despite this bizarre affliction, Dunaway, pictured with her Nikon camera in hand, could be seen, as curator Michael Darling has noted, as an image of female empowerment and agency or perhaps some kind reversal the male gaze. (3) Celebrities reappear elsewhere in Collier's series. Woman with A Camera (The Last Sitting, Bert Stern) (2009) documents a photograph Marilyn Monroe, also posed with her Nikon camera in hand, in what would be her last photo shoot. …