ALONG a corridor in IMMA's east wing the lights have been dimmed and the blinds drawn to submerge Hannah Collins's immense photoworks in a pool of dim, grey light. The adjustments may make it appear as though the August afternoon is threatening snow, but they suit Collins's frosty monochromes, most of which seem to have been taken under wintry conditions in eastern Europe.
The artist often makes her huge images by piecing together several negatives to create broad prints of cinemascope proportions. The photographs often feature rooms temporarily abandoned, or roads momentarily empty, motifs which enhance a sense that these are enlarged frames, culled from a scene moments before a character arrives into shot, or moments after one has departed.
Collins's photography operates, however, in a manner that is almost the opposite to that of cinema. Instead of being rapidly replaced by a new frame, these images encourage the viewer to do the moving, to zoom in, to walk right up and find a new relationship with the huge monochromes.
There is little doubt that Collins has a grip on the business of photographic communication and presentation both in her marshalling of millions of greys within her ultra sharp photographs and in her clever presentation of them. Nevertheless, there is a studied dullness to her images, and even a light dusting of earnestness to her choice of subject, which tends to render them a little grating.
Collins may feel that she has a proprietary relationship to these bleak roads and grimy interiors, with their dilapidated fixtures and bundles of junk, but it is hardly a sustainable belief.
Images which position "eastern Europe" as a glaring symptom of or metaphor for, contemporary global politics have, over the last few years, been thoroughly exploited in every form, from war reportage to pop videos. Indeed, the traffic in such images is so frenzied that it is easy to imagine that the dishevelled territory Collins offers has been ravaged not by decades of Communism, but by the growing legions of invading image foragers.
