This book is introduced by an interesting foreword by Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery, which kind of composes and introduces the collection.
It contains photographs documenting the human condition in the current time, alluding and/or referencing the past, present and future: or visualising different kinds of ‘time’, slower more traditional time and newer more technological time, to put it crudely.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future is contained in time past.’
T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’.
Sometimes disturbing – the picture ‘Life on Film I 2003’ shows us a car in India in good condition, with a man asleep in front of it: it is unlikely to be his car I think – often showing us the provisional nature of life for much of the population, for example in photographs of gypsy encampments within ‘modern’ cities. That this is juxtaposed with pictures such as ‘In the Course of Time, The Road to Auschwitz, 1995’ is unsettling to say the least. One of the earliest shots from 1986, ‘Thin Protective Coverings’, of cardboard boxes, the staple of homeless dwellings and alluding to other more provisional dwellings, offers up questions of modernism, and how far we’ve progressed. This may be a little clumsy a reading, but I cant help noticing. The focus is wider than this, for example in her beautiful black and white portrait of fans (‘In the Course of Time 2, fans, 1996 ) and ramshackle dwellings topped with many, many television aerials ( True Stories I, 1998 ): it’s like she’s showing us the growth of modernism through contrasting the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, and in the conjunction wondering about how they’ll combine, and develop, which might be a more realistic word for what used to be called progress.
It’s also why Iwona Blazwick might refer to the photographs as being able to ‘be experienced as an image and as a kind of architecture; as two dimensional surface and as sculpture’. As well as being a powerfully visual kind of poetry – for example her close up of three ants on the surface of an inflated balloon (Life for Life, 1990) – the pictures suggest something about the politics of space in terms of the quiet contrast between images of more provisional type dwellings and the more hygienic, defined spaces of modern des-res’s ( Mies Pavilion ) and commercial spaces ( Supermarket (pills) 2004 ). One particularly memorable image is ‘True Stories London ( detail )’, which is of rooftops, showing – I presume – a mosques tower in the foreground with the Natwest tower and the city on the horizon.
http://www.hannahcollins.net/
http://www.blackdogonline.com/art/finding,-transmitting,-receiving.html
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2007/05/book_hannah_collins_finding_tr.php
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