Hannah Collins
London (Great Britain), 1956

An English artist often residing and working in Barcelona, Collins studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London between 1974 and 1978, beginning her exhibition career with large-scale black-and-white photographs of landscapes and interiors, still-lifes and figures, always in highly detailed black-and-white. Among these first images, most outstanding are the scenes in which the artist seems to reconcile a meticulous objectivity with an inexpressibly disturbing aroma: such is the case of the still-lifes with oysters and the youngsters with hair so long it covers their entire bodies. The monumentality of her images, printed on cotton and hung directly on the gallery wall, imply a physical experience on the part of the spectator, whose body appears included in the image, in addition to questioning the representative value of photography; while the simplicity of the motifs represented leads to the suspicion that they embody a dense symbolic or metaphorical content. In 1978-79 she was awarded a Fullbright-Hays Scholarship in the United States and in 1991, she won the European Photography Prize. Hannah Collins has exhibited frequently in Europe and the United States, in galleries as well as public institutions and museums, such as the Tate and Victoria and Albert museums of London, the Reina Sofía Centre in Madrid, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis and the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturenea of San Sebastian (Spain). She was a finalist in the Turner Prize 1993. Collins lives between Barcelona, London and San Diego, where she teaches creative photography at the University of California at Davis. Since her first series, such as The Hunter’s Space, in which she reflected upon the situation of regions such as Silesia, Poland after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Signs of Life, in which she depicted the living conditions of emigrants from East to West, toward Istanbul, or In the Course of Time, in which she returned to regions such as Poland after the fall of communism, Hannah Collins’ photographic work is postulated as a reflection on the passage of time, the traces history leaves on people, objects and landscapes. In a panoramic format reminiscent of the silver screen, the subtle and finely honed grey scales of her prints on linen recall the cinematographic tale. And as if they were documentaries, Collins’ pictures allude to the idea of news. F. J. S. M.

Mies Barcelona I, 2002

If the German Pavilion in Barcelona, built by Mies van der Rohe for the 1929 World Fair, is considered to be one of the major paradigms of modern architectural thought, the new Bauhaus building erected in Dessau between 1925 and 1926 by Walter Gropius, who preceded van der Rohe as Bauhaus director, is unquestionably another of its archetypes. Gropius was conscious of the fact that he was constructing a new language, and he entrusted the photographic explanation of the new building in Dessau to two photographers in succession: first to Lucia Moholy, who carried out an apparently objective description of the architecture, especially of the exterior, starting in early 1927, and later, when Lucia Moholy had to leave Dessau to attend to other professional commissions, to Erich Consemüller, a student and collaborator of Gropius’ personal bureau, who photographed the parts Lucia Moholy had not, mostly images of the interior, where the photographs, without abandoning the documentary style, appear as autonomous pieces in which light, composition, spatial depth and gray scales are carefully studied.
In this series on the Barcelona Pavilion, produced in 2002, Hannah Collins seems to have wished to become Lucia Moholy-Nagy, to faithfully represent Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architectural ideas, to disappear as artist in order to allow the creator of the space to play the leading role. As in the photos taken by Lucia of the new Bauhaus building in Dessau, what stands out most is the utter beauty they contain, when the photographer not only seems not to have attempted to carry out expressive efforts -regarding composition, lighting, depth, etc.- but rather, on the contrary, she seems to have carefully avoided them. Are they therefore lacking artisticity, merely pure visual documents of the architect’s idea? By no means, for Hannah Collins’ expressiveness is expressed through an imperceptible subtlety that has to do with vanishing points, alternating between hollow and full, opaque and transparent, the proportions of pavement and roof, the arrangement of the furniture and furnishings: a miniscule language, conjugated by subtleties, in which geometry constitutes the main syntactical element.
Beyond the architectural elements, the artist has favoured the compositional factors characteristic of the abstract painting of the thirties. In Mies Barcelona I, with the large picture window in the background, the camera lens seems to have discovered a series of lines in perspective giving rise to a space that seems to be in expansion, visually surpassing the picture frame. Hannah Collins has intended to reconstruct a picture of the building, inverting the utopian process that was the brainchild of Theo van Doesburg, who considered the modern building to be a development of modern painting, yet where there were no artworks on the walls. F. J. S. M.

Mies Barcelona II, 2002

Although since the nineties Hannah Collins has deployed colour photography with ever more frequency, the images of the Mies Pavilion in Barcelona constitute a certain exception with regards to the general direction of her career, and not so much due to the use of colour in itself, as to the strict and organised geometric composition of the image.
For an artist such as Hannah Collins, coming across the Barcelona Pavilion is like having the opportunity to photograph the idea of modernity in its pure, unpolluted state, without disruptions or betrayals. A building beyond history, an immemorial monument. Regarding his edifice in Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe emphasised its exemplary nature and his conception of it as an ideal model of a just and beautiful world, and to this effect he wrote, “The chaos we live in will be replaced by order and the world will once again be meaningful and beautiful”.
The pictures of the Barcelona Pavilion produced by the English photographer have become a field of visual relationships and counterbalancing of masses, of hallowed and filled, of light and shadow, in which elemental geometry is foremost. In Mies Barcelona II, as opposed to the earlier picture, the forceful lines are more contained and the image seems to be situated on the very edges of the frame. However, despite the fact that on an intellectual level we comprehend that the pavilion is arranged in a strictly octagonal structure of planes that intersect at 90° angles, the picture Hannah Collins produced consists of a meticulous crisscrossing of diagonals, an unstable space in which all points lead to an accelerated departure. And this is so despite the fact that the architect had conceived the small building in Barcelona as an ideal mathematical space from which any reference to suffering and the negative contingencies of history have been eliminated. Hence, the artist has obtained a dynamic and expressive image of a building that was meant as an example of compositional parsimony.
The Pavilion appears to be a Sancta sanctorum of the Esprit nouveau in which the disorder of life has been carefully excluded. The space has become the pure encounter of different vanishing points and the harmonious coexistence of very different materials. “Peacefulness, luxury and voluptuousness”, those watchwords of Baudelaire employed by Matisse as paradigm of visual decoration and pleasure in his new Arcadia, could very well be applied to this artificial and ideal environment in which van der Rohe was able to synthesise his ideal of habitability. F. J. S. M.