Christine Collins holds a BA in literature from Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY) and a MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art (Boston, MA). She has taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops (Rockport, ME), Massachusetts College of Art, and is an adjunct faculty member at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University (Boston, MA). Her work has been shown at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) and was included in American Photography 22.

Collins is represented by jen bekman in New York and recently participated in the gallery’s group show inspired by one of Frank O’ Hara’s poems, Mediations on an Emergency. Her mysterious and haunting images are ripe with narrative possibilities. Featured online is a selection from two ongoing series: “acreage” and “new path.” In this selection, objects, fragments, and reflections become palpable players in the scenes. Collins's images hover in an arena somewhere between the interior and exterior, the familiar and unfamiliar, and the literal and metaphor.

- Leslie K. Brown, PRC Curator

Click here for Collins ’s web site

Acreage and New Path

In my photographs, I navigate the geography of the domestic landscape. Familiar objects are isolated and elevated, as the sublime invades the prosaic. Light illuminates and transforms. I am interested in the residue of life, how elements such as time, human usage and nature make their mark on our surroundings. The series “acreage” was made both in homes I am familiar with and houses I have never been before. I fixate on the objects in the places, my own possible connections to them, both real and desired. The resulting photographs offer an enigmatic index.

My pictures have always swirled around my own story from varying distances. I am interested in the weaving together of personal experience and fictional possibilities. It has been a means of reckoning with my own history, while imagining others. I have always been fascinated and horrified by the fact that I often feel as though I can’t remember my own life. I know the story but feel disconnected from the experience. The objects in the photographs become surrogates for these experiences and the house becomes the stage. By creeping around these empty houses, staring at these objects through the ground glass, recontextualizing them, I find myself.

I also photograph people and the landscape.  In this selection from the series “new path,” I am interested in making photographs that seem to suggest the periphery – the periphery of vision, of space and of memory.  Figures, interacting with the landscape, are stilled in moments of contemplation, the indications of both possible narratives and nature induced reveries. 

- Christine Collins

Click on each image for larger version and caption.

Acreage

New Path