Please join us in London next week, Tuesday 5 May, from 6pm to celebrate the launch of our new title, Ask Alexa When we are all gonna die tomorrow :) by Annie Collinge. All welcome. The book is an edition of 200 and comes with a tipped in signed print.
Jane & Jeremy are pleased to announce a forthcoming publication with artist and photographer Annie Collinge. Known for her playful take on still life and fashion image making, here she turns her eye to a make believe domestic setting, using her son as the main character.
“For the past few years I have been making pictures with my son. It’s a way for to us communicate with each other (and a break from the alternative, which is sitting next to him while he plays Goat Simulator 3). I am a collector of things in my work and life, so I wanted to explore the accumulation of childhood detritus in domestic life and the landfill it creates. The project began when I found a post-it note by my son’s bed: Ask Alexa when we are all gonna die tomorrow :-). He often writes notes to remind himself of tasks for the next day, as he sometimes struggles to remember things. Yet he remembers the exact buttons on a coat I was wearing when he threw up spaghetti in a cinema five years ago. There is a tension in this note between fear of forgetting and existential dread.”
In the series Collinge also explores the use of on-camera flash, a process she found liberating, adding to the sense of playfulness and experimentation. “For years I’ve used only natural light and have spent countless mornings watching the weather
and stressing about having enough light a use to small aperture for the picture. So the flash was like a new kind of freedom for me. Suddenly I could make pictures in the dark, in windowless rooms, or in tight, awkward spaces. And the flash travels through cheap, plastic objects, giving them an otherworldliness. It draws a line in shadows around everything, making things feel somehow ominous. Almost forensic, like a crime scene with no incident.”
The resulting images are a collection of strange domestic snapshots; a series of experiments, subverting the tropes of photographing home life and childhood. As Collinge reflects “It’s hard not to fall into cliché when taking pictures of your own child,
the urge to make them look cherubic, cute. I wanted to resist this and do something more real, more like the way I take photographs of adults and of accumulation, and the strange comfort of asking a device in the corner of the room a question it cannot possibly answer.”