Uncover photographer Annie Collinge’s subversive dwelling life

There is no-one making work fairly like photographer Annie Collinge. Soaked in color and with a wholesome sprint of surrealism, Collinge’s work performs with our expectations of the mundane in a fashion which veers between the lovable and the sinister. In combining sturdy colors with esoteric objects and an uncanny gaze, she performs with dimension, dimensions, the actual and the faux, presenting the acquainted anew.

She has labored with manufacturers together with Valentino, in 2023 successful a Grammy for the duvet artwork for Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork alongside her long-time collaborators the artwork director duo, Rottingdean Bazaar. In her new ebook Ask Alexa when we are all gonna die tomorrow :-) she has made a sequence along with her son.

‘I simply began taking photos of experimenting with him as a mannequin, and determined a few years in the past that I needed to make a ebook,’ Collinge says.

She may be very collaborative in her work, a pure begin for the picture sequence created along with her 12-year-old son, who turns 13 this month. Collinge’s sister Miranda is a author and has contributed a poem to the ebook, making it a household affair; for Collinge this means of working with people who find themselves in your each day life makes spontaneous inventive work simpler.

(Image credit score: Annie Collinge)

Collinge has created sequence with Julie Verhoeven, Peter Jensen and Tim Key, however her longest partnership is with Rottingdean Bazaar, with whom she has labored with quite a few manufacturers together with BIMBA Y LOLA, Bottega Venetta and the Thames & Hudson Catwalk Series.

‘I really don’t like working on my own,’ she explains. ‘It is a difficult thing for an artist, it’s sad but it’s like also being a twin and it’s helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. The ultimate thing is to find people that you can be so brutally honest with that it doesn’t matter.’

(Image credit: Annie Collinge)

The book’s title comes from a note Collinge’s son left for her one evening, and the photographs in this series address, in part, the one-dimensional way parenthood and family life are often portrayed online.

‘I think it isolates people that aren’t parents, and I think it isolates people that perhaps haven’t found parenthood is exactly how they imagined it to be,’ the photographer says. ‘So, I find those images quite jarring and I was very conscious of not making them myself.’

While there are images of Collinge’s son in the book, there are also many images of interiors and object. The process of looking for objects online and in real life; acquiring them; capturing them on film; and, eventually, letting them go is intrinsic to what Collinge (who has also published a book titled Things I Looked at on eBay) does.

(Image credit: Annie Collinge)

Collinge’s love of objects comes in part from being raised in London by a British father and an American mother, and objects from America having huge resonance in the home in a pre-Google world. After having to clear her grandmother’s house as a child in California, she developed an aversion to hoarding, so her process of acquiring and shedding items she finds in charity shops and online is offset by being able to somehow own these objects in an image.

‘I’m kind of an antiques dealer on the side,’ she confesses, adding that she is currently collecting Lucite paperweights, and is also renovating a 1960s Severalls doll’s house. Made as part of patients’ rehabilitation at a hospital in Essex, they are now collectibles and once the project is completed and the photographs have been taken, the items will be sold.

(Image credit: Annie Collinge)

For all the process that goes into making her photographs, Collinge’s images stay with you. They persist both for their subversiveness and for how pleasurable she makes those subversions feel to look at. In Ask Alexa she takes us on an intimate journey through the place where her art meets her life.

(Image credit: Annie Collinge)

(Image credit: Annie Collinge)