photo by Matthew Leifheit for CCNY

Bridget Collins

1990 Minneapolis, MN

Bridget Collins feels for you. Her photographs are earnest, generous, and easy to relate to. Above all they are empathetic. Delicately observed notes on the nature of beauty, human relationships and the physical world these pictures hint at the humanity of their author and let you know she understands.

“I feel like all of my work is empathetic, its about connection,” Collins recently told MATTE. “My process is all about giving small things due attention, being present and trying to connect myself with my environment.  The photos themselves show lots of contact between disparate things touching or holding each other. I like the middle ground, seeing things from both sides.  I think this is apparent even in my choice of palette, my colors aren’t very vibrant, everything sort of blurs into a greenish-grey, lost in a fog of missed connections and deja vu.”

Collins’ latest project, a self-published zine entitled “Excerpts From A Palm Reading” (available here), mines incidental snapshots she has taken in the last year. These photos are combined with edited down text from the 2013 Yahoo.com Gemini Horoscope, creating a collection of extractions from Collins’ past with advice for her future interspersed. The ambiguity of Collins’ eye makes these very personal snapshots universally relatable, creating a sequence of somehow familiar moments to which the viewer can bring personal history and make connections. As Collins puts it, “I like clichés, I like pop songs ya know?”

Bridget Collins cover for Packet Biweekly issue 2/17/2013

Bridget Collins “Soho Forestry Guide” for Packet Biweekly issue 01/21/13, photo courtesy Chris Nosenzo

Bridget Collins cover for Packet Biweekly issue 2/17/2013

Collins is also a regular contributor to the new journal “Packet Biweekly”, a collated and stapled publication founded late in 2012 by artist and graphic designer for Bloomberg Business Week Chris Nosenzo, who is her friend and fellow alumni of Pratt Institute. “Along with many other of our friends at Pratt, Bridget’s work helped define what kind of content Packet should have, as opposed to Packet having a distinct vision that this kind of work just happened to fit into. In other words I saw what Bridget and our friends were creating and felt like it needed a form; so Packet was born for the work that we create,” says Nosenzo. Collins uses Packet as a platform for experimentation, taking advantage of the relatively low overhead afforded by its zine format. “Packet is literally a packet of ideas.  It’s cheap and disposable and comes out every two weeks.  It’s an awesome thing to work on, filled with tangents, half-finished projects, and late-night bursts of inspiration,” comments Collins.

Through Collins’ eyes the audience is privy to a world of subtlety and wonder. Moments of transcendence are presented as a trail of breadcrumbs left behind as Collins moves through life. These are small offerings, solutions to the daily preoccupations of human existence. In this way they are very hopeful. “When I was young, I was very much an escapist,” says Collins.  “I didn’t think anything beautiful existed in real life, only in movies and television.  My work now is sort of a protest against that, a way of trying to remain present and come to terms with my surroundings.”

-MATTE Magazine for CCNY