By Jackson Davidow, June 10, 2025
Though the picture is simple, its array of references is anything but. On a lightly streaked gray floor, a single record album leans against a white wall. Its jacket features a handsome man gazing down at his reflection in a small pool while achingly embracing the sandy edges: a still of Jean Marais as the titular character in Jean Cocteau’s “Orphée” (1950), a surrealist film reinterpreting the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this retelling of epic heartbreak, the pool functions as not only a transfixing mirror, but also a gateway to the underworld. In 1983, The Smiths used this image of longing for their record “This Charming Man”, as if to indicate that one might very well get lost in the vibrations of Morrissey’s velvety voice.
The photo, “Untitled (This Charming Man)” 2009, appears in Anne Collier: Portraits, the artist’s latest exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery in New York City. But is it a portrait? To include it in an exhibition with this particular focus is to advance a conceptional reframing of the genre of portraiture—one of the artist’s most consistent commitments across her probing practice. Portraiture, Collier seems to suggest, is far more capacious than capturing an individual’s likeness. It is also about processes of remediation, dissemination, and interpretation that produce a sense or feeling of a likeness: the resplendent intertextuality, the layers of signification that accrue around and thereby constitute a body in representation; the subjective affinities that emerge through the photographic act and subsequently. Collier has even suggested that “Untitled (This Charming Man)” and other works are self-portraits by other means. Nearby, similar photos, likely taken on that same floor, focus on one, two, and then three well-worn copies of Norman Mailer’s “Marilyn: A Biography” from 1973, a book filled with photos of the movie star published eleven years after her death. Calling to mind Andy Warhol’s famous screen prints from the 1960s, this trio of works likewise revels in lineages of appropriation and repetition yet more cynically highlights the wear and tear of objects, narratives, and icons over time.
Presenting a focused mix of works created between 2003 and 2025, this exhibition also foregrounds two significant series that subject portraiture to new possibilities, yet with more of an emphasis on her own communities. For her “Aura” portrait series from 2003 to 2004, Collier brought artist friends such as Frances Stark, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, and John Baldessari to a psychic store in Oakland, California, and took their pictures with a modified Polaroid camera, thought to have the power of visualizing the unique contours of one’s energy field. In this precious, color-saturated body of work—a throwback to the Bay Area’s psychedelic wonder of yesteryear—the faintly visible sitters are upstaged by the magnificence of their individual auras. These small, spectral Polaroids contrast and intermingle in the gallery with c-prints from her ongoing “Developing” series: intense close-up left eye portraits, also of friends and peers, meticulously rephotographed in a darkroom developing tray so that there’s a visual echo between the subject’s tear duct and the tray’s pouring lip. One can almost see the artist’s reflection in the subjects’ eyes, so the notion that these are self-portraits is hardly farfetched. Yet amid this assortment of bewitching left eyes, identified in the titles as belonging to the likes of Karl Holmqvist, Vinson Fraley, Klara Lidén, we encounter two such eye works appropriated from postwar comics—an unsubtle reference, of course, to Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dot paintings. Viewers are met by this odd assembly of one-eyed gazes, recruited as participants in this complex visual interplay. Perhaps they are the ultimate subject of Collier’s portraiture.
Jackson Davidow is a writer, curator, and art historian living in New Haven, and his essays on photography have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, Aperture, The Baffler, Poetry, and Momus, among many other publications.
ANNE COLLIER "Aura (Mike Kelley)" 2003. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Anne Collier.
ANNE COLLIER "Developing (Dalad Kambhu)" 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Anne Collier.
ANNE COLLIER "Developing (Vinson Fraley)" 2025. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Anne Collier.
ANNE COLLIER "Studio Floor #1 (Marilyn, Norman Mailer), 2009. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Anne Collier.
ANNE COLLIER "Untitled (This Charming Man)", 2009. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow © Anne Collier.