SITUATION #72

Women Crying comprises a set of images with a recurring motif: crying women, their faces magnified and cropped. Anne Collier took the original images from LP covers from the 1960s to the 1980s, which, in keeping with titles such as You like to make little girls cry (Daniele Alexander), are adorned by pictures of women crying. By removing these images from their original context and subjecting them to a critical visual analysis, Collier unmasks the romanticised, staged vulnerability of womanhood. Women Crying reveals this emotional imagery as a gender-specific strategy of representation that continually evokes and propagates the selfsame subtext. Through the act of recontextualization, Collier creates an analytical counter-perspective to the view of femininity that is usually depicted by the media.