London, United Kingdom, 1956. Lives and works in London and Spain.
English photographer, active also in Spain. She studied at the Slade School of Art (1974–8) and became known for her large-scale, black-and-white photographs of evocative interiors and landscapes. Collins questioned photography's role of representing reality in a manageable scale. The huge scale of her photographs demanded a physical experience as well as a conceptual one. Collins's subject-matter was often vistas: the desert, the city of Barcelona, where she lived, or alternatively interiors that she constructed herself by lining rooms with such materials as cardboard or mattresses. These interiors were sometimes empty and sometimes included people and objects. From 2001-2004 she held the position of Professor of Photography at the University of California at Davis. In 1993 she was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2001 received the Olympus award. Her work is in many international collections including the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; and the Luxembourg Museum.