Collins questioned photography’s role of representing reality in a manageable scale. The huge scale of her photographs demanded a physical experience as well as a conceptual one. The location of the viewer’s body to the work also evoked issues regarding a relationship to geographic place. Collins’s subject-matter was often vistas: the desert, the city of Barcelona, where she lived, or alternatively interiors that she constructed herself by lining rooms with such materials as cardboard or mattresses. These interiors were sometimes empty and sometimes included people and objects. Most of Collins’s photographs have a sense of being open to metaphorical or symbolic interpretation because of the simplicity of the presentation. She became known as an artist who expanded the realm of photographic practice.
Turner Prize 1993 artists: Hannah Collins
Hannah Collins studied at the Slade School of Art (1974–8) and became known for her large-scale, black-and-white photographs of evocative interiors and landscapes. These works often had a sense of moody abandonment to them.