Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is - Baron Issue 6

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.