Petra Collins suggested we meet at one of her favorite spots, the Little Tokyo Galleria in downtown Los Angeles.
As soon as we stepped through the mall’s sliding glass doors it immediately became clear why she loves the place. The din elicited a tectonic feeling as flocks of teenagers perused racks of vintage clothes outside the Daiso supermarket, lined up for tattoos, handmade hair clips, anime stickers and pastel jewelry boxes made to look like tiny sheet cakes. That thrilling suffusion of bright, synesthetic noise evokes not only the state of Ms. Collins’s mind, but also the lens through which she often sees the world.
Ms. Collins grants us access to that suffusion with her new book “STAR,” which Rizzoli publishes on Tuesday. “STAR” is a series of original photographs that present the story of a fictional pop star as she becomes entangled with an Asian pop group and offers a lurid take on fame and fandom.
Each of the five chapters is named after a pop song from the 1990s or 2000s — “Lucky,” “Erase/Rewind,” “White Flag,” “Perfect Day” and “Piece of Me” — and follows Ashley, a quiet student catapulted into solo stardom alongside Siren8, a girl group she tours with until mysteriously vanishing. The story is recounted in a style reminiscent of “Rashomon,” using a number of unreliable sources, including an obsessed, possibly dangerous fan, and Yuyu, Ashley’s closest friend, who surfaces in online forums years after the singer’s disappearance and tries to correct the record.
Visually, “STAR” represents a deliberate return to what Ms. Collins calls the “flowy and naïve” approach of her early work. Unstudied, imperfect and diffuse, the images — alongside bits of spare, inscrutable prose — collectively present a new version of a story Ms. Collins has been telling since she was 15, about the unblinking eye trained on girls.
“STAR” reads less like a book and more like a blueprint for a film, which is fitting because Ms. Collins has always yearned to direct one, and has begun working on her first feature (details under wraps for now).
The original idea for “STAR” was inspired, in part, by another one of Ms. Collins’s other projects, a book series entitled “OMG, I’m Being Killed,” in which she repurposed rejected commissioned work as new art. The original brief from a client came with the prompt: What is femininity?
“Obviously a lot of my work was about girlhood, but it’s such a difficult dark thing, and I can’t explain it to anyone in a 100 percent positive light,” Ms. Collins said. “My book is about femininity, and it is dark. That’s how I see it. And that is how it is.”
Ms. Collins, 33, said she had been on TikTok and felt overwhelmed to the point of defeat by the onslaught of negative imagery for girls and women. She believed it had only grown worse compared with when she was growing up in the 2000s.
“I’ve never been hit on as much as I was when I was 12 or 13,” she said. “I remember the first time it happened. I was walking to get the subway to school and two men were like, ‘Beautiful legs. What do you do? Are you a model?’” I remember the feeling, you know, guilt and shame. And it’s worse now. I’m so sick of it”
What Does Petra Collins Do?
For more than half of her life, Ms. Collins’s images have captured a Gen Y aesthetic. She was a prominent subject and collaborator of the photographer Ryan McGinley and the de facto house photographer for Rookie, Tavi Gevinson’s 2010’s digital teen-girl bible. More recently, she has been directing music videos for Olivia Rodrigo, Selena Gomez and Cardi B among others.
Ms. Collins, who grew up in Toronto, began taking photographs in high school, shooting professionally for Vice magazine when she was a senior in 2010. That year, she founded the Ardorous, a feminist artist collective and online gallery that gave young artists a key hub in the early days of internet art culture.
But Ms. Collins is that rare photographer who has also spent a good deal of time on the other side of the camera. She was part of the electric cast of wayward innocents streaking under sparkler-lit night skies in Ryan McGinley’s “Roadtrip” photo series, which was taken during their cross-country trip in 2013.
Ms. Collins also works as a model: She walked the runway for Gucci in 2016 and is currently a face of Chemena Kamali’s Chloé. In fact, Ms. Collins explained she was feeling a bit dazed wandering around the Galleria. She had just returned from Paris fashion week, where she was as a social media correspondent for Miu Miu.
Mr. McGinley, who has known Ms. Collins since she was a teenager, has said the most common thing people ask about her is, What exactly does she do?
The short answer is a lot. As Mr. McGinley explained in an email, “Petra is an artist that moves effortlessly between fine art, fashion and pop stars.” He added that the two share a siblinglike bond and have a “shorthand when we talk” about creative life. This might explain how he can, as he put it, “see the thread through all Petra’s magnificent work.”
Ms. Collins believes the descriptor that fits her best is curator. In fact, she briefly studied art curation at Ontario College of Art and Design before dropping out and moving to New York when she was 20.
“I love picking out works and having them have conversations with each other,” Ms. Collins said.
Yet Ms. Collins does not have a studio, “because I’m like, what am I going to do in there?” Even curator doesn’t feel fully accurate to her. Ask the question another way: What is her process? How does she document it when she has a new idea?
“I don’t,” she said, laughing. “I just have them in my head and then I’m like …” she trails off. “It’s really messy. If I write an idea down it’s like it disappears.”
Everything Is a Blur
Petra Collins early photographic signature, and the aesthetic with which she is most associated, is a woozy, neon vision of a smudged teenage girlhood. It was initially less a deliberate construction and more a byproduct of a practical reality: She couldn’t see.
“I have crazy bad eyesight, like two prescriptions away from legally blind,” she said. “As a kid I would have so many dreams of going blind.” Her poor vision is one reason she started taking photographs. “I was like, I need to see! I know people are like, Petra Collins wipe off your lens, but when I was like 15, 16, didn’t have glasses. So in a lot of the early work the softness comes from literally not being able to see properly.”
But there is also a blur that comes from a sense of dislocation. Hungarian is Ms. Collins’s first language; she was enrolled in an English as a second language program and “really struggled in school,” which made her feel alienated from her peers. As an adult, that feeling has stuck with her now that she is not in touch with her parents.
While Ms. Collins has spoken in the past about her family to The New Yorker — her father was a former criminal lawyer who ran a hosiery shop, where he met her mother, a Hungarian refugee, after she emigrated to Canada — she no longer speaks of them directly.
It’s “frustrating,” she said, to keep that part of her life locked away because so much of her work is informed by the abuse she endured as a young person and the experience of growing up in an unstable home (the family was evicted at one point).
But Ms. Collins remains extremely close with her younger sister, Anna, a dancer and movement specialist who works with Parkinson’s disease patients, and to whom Petra refers as her “first and forever muse.” Ms. Collins is recently engaged to Jake Nadrich, a composer, and Anna was just engaged to one of Mr. Nadrich’s childhood friends.
“I’m like, if there is a God, this is the end of the cycle of trauma, and we’ve created our own little family and that’s that,” she said.
The first picture Ms. Collins took that made her realize the psychedelic potential of photography featured their friends in Toronto.
“They were sitting at the end of my bed, and they were smoking a cigarette,” she said. Because it was very bright in the room, Ms. Collins assumed the photos would be, too. Instead, “they were so visually dark. I mean, I cast something onto them, and they also projected something back.”
There seems to be a nearly permanent tension in Ms. Collins and her work between hope and despair, between a primal, willful joy and a connection to and awareness of an omnipotent, undefeatable male gaze.
That photo, “In My Bed,” was shot 17 years ago, but Ms. Collins said her work was still animated by the same impulse to use her camera as a way to view her life. The results, she said, have never matched what she imagines in her head. This could sound terrifying to some artists, but to her, it has only been a source of wonder.
“Every time, it’s still such a treat to get the photos back to see what was really going on,” she said.
The post She Invented a Dark Tale About Fame, Fandom and Young Women appeared first on New York Times.
