Petra Collins

Artist

1992-12-21

Quotes by Petra Collins

• I was very depressed at a young age and felt like I didn't have agency towards that. Being 'female' meant I couldn't be that - I couldn't be angry, loud, sullen. Being sad meant I was weak.

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• My favorite place to go is Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. If you see it at sunrise and sunset, it's like you're on Mars.

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• My mom had been a script supervisor in Hungary, but you can't just jump into that in Canada without knowing any English. She worked retail jobs and raised my sister and me while learning English.

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• My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.

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• Because I loved dance, I always need to be physical and moving, so photography that is more tactile made more sense.

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• I didn't really have an identity crisis because I really, really knew who I always wanted to be But I definitely had a lot of problems with my body. I was very skinny, and I guess my body was sort of pre-pubescent, but when I grew hips and thighs, I just didn't know where I was in the world. It was weird.

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• From the beginning of puberty, I did really badly in school. I was super dyslexic; I was in special ed. I had a hard time reading and writing, so I thought that my self worth was in my looks, how I presented myself, and how other people perceived me.

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• The feminist movement is way bigger than the word. I don't police people on what they call themselves, but equality and a general sense of togetherness are really important to me.

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• I post all the time anyway. It's part of who I am. There's me IRL. There's me URL. That's just my life. Plus, I love it. It's amazing to connect with so many people.

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• The selfie is revolutionary to me. It is, I think, the only point in history where masses of young girls and women have been able to control, create, and publish images of themselves.

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• As a young woman, I was disturbed by the fact that there was no imagery that truly expressed the experience of a young woman and the challenges and turbulence we go through. All we had were teenage magazines like 'Cosmopolitan,' which are very one-sided and show an objectified view of women.

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• Being taken seriously as a young woman is the biggest hurdle as I grow older.

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• I started out taking photos of my friends on, like, disposable cameras, and I documented my younger sister and her friends all through high school.

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