An important and compelling document of the work of one of the world’s foremost contemporary photographers, Finding, Transmitting, Receiving features both widely known and never-before-seen images, found family portraits and childhood drawings, as well as the complete scripts for her
film projects.
Collins, who divides her time between Barcelona and London, is celebrated for her large-scale installations and films. Winner of the prestigious European Photography Award and short listed for the Turner Prize, she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and has held professorships at the University of California at Davis and the Royal College of Art in London.
Her projects include work in the former Eastern Bloc, with gypsy communities in Barcelona and in a remote village during a Russian winter, as well as other lengthy involvements in wide-ranging locations. All of these, through Collins' work, create a broad canvas on which to contemplate the human condition.
In each place Collins documents the omnipresence of a universal modernism and the global features of modernity. At the same time, her lens reveals the cracks and fissures through which the ancient and the culturally specific become visible. Homelessness, migration and the global effects of shifting economic patterns are recurring themes in her work, as is the power of place and architecture to communicate historic events.
A comprehensive look at this fascinating artist, Finding, Transmitting, Receiving brings a breadth of vision and understanding to Collins' work, giving readers the chance to discover photographs and films that are in collections scattered worldwide. The book coincides with the completion of her most recent film project 'Current History' and will complement a major forthcoming exhibition of Collins' work at the Fundacion La Caixa in Barcelona and Madrid.
With an introduction by Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and a critic, lecturer and broadcaster on contemporary art.
Finding, Transmitting, Receiving: Hannah Collins collects together, for the first time, wide-ranging work by the artist, photographer and filmmaker from the past fifteen years. The book consists of photographs, film scripts, found family portraits and childhood drawings, and coincides with the opening of an exhibition of Collins' work, at the Fundacion La Caixa in Madrid and Barcelona. Collins, who has exhibited across the globe including New York, London, Barcelona and Montreal, is celebrated for her large-scale photography installations and films with such diverse subjects as the residents of a village in Central Russia, African immigrants in European cities and gypsies in a Barcelona barrio.The book includes both well known and never before seen pictures well as the complete scripts for her film projects. The book is grouped by concept into five sections: "Events and Conditions," "Finding Transmitting Receiving," "Scripts," "Family and Evidence" and "Pavilions," which both separate out Collins' themes (including the power of place and architecture to communicate historic events and social ideas) and allow the reader to find their own links between the images and ideas that she presents, and to forge their own meanings.
