The imagination of Petra F. Collins

Your defining visual aesthetic was established very early on. You have been taking photographs since you were 15. Your first major publication was in Rookie magazine (an online magazine about teenagers by teenagers, founded in 2011 - ed.). How did you start taking photos?

Art was to me the way of communicating, and surviving because I did have a very difficult childhood. It was my safe place. It was a way I know how to communicate and play with. The play was the most important thing I learned in my creative process. Whenever I was playing as a child, I made a play, a little film. I wanted to end up in ballet, but I had to stop at 14 because I had to get knee surgery. I thought that was my medium. But at 15 photography started to be part of my body and my mind, and it moves with me as I age or as I learn.

I think it is important not to go to school for a medium because you need to strengthen everything else. I knew I don’t need to learn necessarily any technical, but I needed to expand my mind and learn studies so I could bring into that photo. That’s the way it’s developed. I have learned every stage of my life I’m interested in. And looking back on my life is important to realize the actual context and motions behind all those photos. One of my biggest epiphany of mine was that such a major body of my work is teenagehood and I remembered later I never lived a real teenage life.

Your images can highlight the emotions that distinguish the special period of teenage life and the inevitable transition to adulthood. Should we imagine your childhood as it appears in your pictures?

It was very much like that, but I think when It comes to me from those photos when I'm looking at it, there is like a darkness to it, there is like the heaviness of what our actual life was. What I love those images about is the idealized teen-hood, but there is a darkness in them. I don’t know if I noticed in that age. They are visually also pretty dark. Simultaneously I was living that sort of teenage life, but carrying a lot of really heavy things. It is always interesting to me to see those photos what I was projecting and then what was really in those images. It is never possible to create anything objective because everything is subjective, but a documentary. The artists also play a major part in documentarian photos.

Your photographs challenge figures of femininity, images of female bodies, and expressions of girls’ sensuality hidden in their personal spaces, in their rooms from the very beginning. The pictures blend sexuality with the innocence associated with early girlhood. Seems an inexhaustible topic for you. What would you say about how these topics developed during all these years of practice? How has your style and vision changed through these years?

I think this is interesting because it started so young. You can see the progression. Grappling with your sexuality, and growing into women. The topic I was always interested in is sexuality, but it is changing as I grow and age. I started with a naturalistic style because that was me at that time, the real and truth-telling was of show images. And as I grew I changed my perspective on reality, so at one period I moved into strong lightning and dark colors, and moved into a more surreal work. For me at that time, or even now, I found that more real than trying to like “document” anything, because of the shift that happened on the Internet and how we perceive ourselves. After 2014 we made a switch to be half of our lives online. You are an avatar most of the day. If you try to capture what it is like to be human, it is a misstep not to bring in the surreal. We live part of us online, we present ourselves in a fully different way, as a whole different character. So my work is a step back into the surreal, but to me, it is the most real. That’s how my work developed. I like to add assorted building sets or use prosthetics because it feels like real life, as people edit photos, use filters, and present false realities.

A Miért vagy te, ha lehetsz én is? series is already like an experimental film in itself, evoking the aesthetics of 70s magazines. You use the camera as a third person, and perhaps in this series, you break completely from the aesthetics of your earlier work and enter into that mentioned surreal.

That series was an exorcism to me. I had to change my style because of Euphoria. Lots of people started to take photos in that style and I haven’t felt any more as mine and I felt disconnected from that. I need to find myself again, cause I didn’t resonate with this anymore. That was a big turning point in my life. That body of work I liked so much, because I felt so disconnected from my body, from my work. I was like how do I get myself back to my body? I don’t do self-portraits, I physically need to hold the camera, because lots of my work come is in camera. I also felt violent towards myself, and my body, and I needed to create another version, and it was really therapeutic and exciting to place myself anywhere, photograph myself from any angle. That series was a starting point to create a newer style of photography for me.

Your most recent photo book is Fairy Tales, an erotic folklore book of short stories told in pictures starring Alexa Demie. You co-created the concept and text, in which Alexa plays nine fantasy characters. As children, you were both fascinated by fairy tales that offered an escape from your own painful realities. What are those themes that could end up in a photo book?

All my big works end up like this. I need special things like books. Naturally, that is the way I want to present it. Alexa Damie and I were only planning to do one shoot. I had posted a picture of Liv Tyler from Lord of the Rings and Alexa replied that she would like to be like that one day, and I asked her if we should try it. The photoshoot went so well, it worked so naturally, and we both loved the result, that we agreed to make more characters. By the time it was put together into a series, we were craving the book format. The series was based on the folk tales and cartoons I watched as a child, but I wanted to create my own character and enter another world through that.