Baron, Petra Collins

For the sixth edition of Baron, artist Petra Collins flips the camera lens onto herself... more specifically into herself. Uninhibited, gross, disjointed, and confusing, Collins places us in a world filled with perverse personal thoughts and lucid landscapes.

With the book’s Hungarian title Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is? Collins asks us: Why be you, when you can be me? Collins uses the camera as the third person. It captures historical truths (such as a time and place) and an emotional reality with a complicated relationship to intention and perception. Working with the sculptor Sarah Sitkin, Collins creates moulds of her body as well as her sisters to gain ownership, in a world where our bodies live in multiple realities. This new body of work features Collins first experiments with self-portraiture.

‘I’ve seen my camera take on many truths. And the truths that shocked me the most to see, were my own. I see them in every image I have taken. Seldom am I the subject of my images but I often make my way into the matter of them’.

Acknowledging this, these photographs are set in a world of ‘constructed’ domestic interiors contrasted with ‘real’ exterior locations and Collins own family and friends.

The sixth instalment of Baron introduces the art director Sandra Leko who has collaborated with Collin’s to present this new body of work in book form that is inspired by the graphics and layouts of Japanese Kinbaku magazines, the sequencing of the images are disjointed, ambiguous and represent its own peculiar logic.

Published by Baron 
Hardcover
166 pages
220 x 285 mm