Step into photographer Annie Collinge's sweet and sinister domestic world

There is no-one making work quite like photographer Annie Collinge. Soaked in colour and with a healthy dash of surrealism, Collinge’s work plays with our expectations of the mundane in a manner which veers between the cute and the sinister. In combining strong colours with esoteric objects and an uncanny gaze, she plays with size, dimensions, the real and the fake, presenting the familiar anew.

She has worked with brands including Valentino, in 2023 winning a Grammy for the cover art for Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork alongside her long-time collaborators the art director duo, Rottingdean Bazaar. In her new book Ask Alexa when we are all gonna die tomorrow :-) she has made a series with her son.

'I just started taking pictures of experimenting with him as a model, and decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to make a book,' Collinge says.

She is very collaborative in her work, a natural start for the photo series created with her 12-year-old son, who turns 13 this month. Collinge’s sister Miranda is a writer and has contributed a poem to the book, making it a family affair; for Collinge this process of working with people who are in your daily life makes spontaneous creative work easier.

Collinge has created series with Julie Verhoeven, Peter Jensen and Tim Key, but her longest partnership is with Rottingdean Bazaar, with whom she has worked with numerous brands including BIMBA Y LOLA, Bottega Venetta and the Thames & Hudson Catwalk Series.

'I really don’t like working on my own,' she explains. 'It is a difficult thing for an artist, it's sad but it's like also being a twin and it's helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. The ultimate thing is to find people that you can be so brutally honest with that it doesn't matter.'

The book’s title comes from a note Collinge's son left for her one evening, and the photographs in this series address, in part, the one-dimensional way parenthood and family life are often portrayed online.

'I think it isolates people that aren't parents, and I think it isolates people that perhaps haven't found parenthood is exactly how they imagined it to be,' the photographer says. 'So, I find those images quite jarring and I was very conscious of not making them myself.'

While there are images of Collinge's son in the book, there are also many images of interiors and object. The process of looking for objects online and in real life; acquiring them; capturing them on film; and, eventually, letting them go is intrinsic to what Collinge (who has also published a book titled Things I Looked at on eBay) does.

Collinge's love of objects comes in part from being raised in London by a British father and an American mother, and objects from America having huge resonance in the home in a pre-Google world. After having to clear her grandmother’s house as a child in California, she developed an aversion to hoarding, so her process of acquiring and shedding items she finds in charity shops and online is offset by being able to somehow own these objects in an image.

'I'm kind of an antiques dealer on the side,' she confesses, adding that she is currently collecting Lucite paperweights, and is also renovating a 1960s Severalls doll’s house. Made as part of patients’ rehabilitation at a hospital in Essex, they are now collectibles and once the project is completed and the photographs have been taken, the items will be sold.

For all the process that goes into making her photographs, Collinge’s images stay with you. They persist both for their subversiveness and for how pleasurable she makes those subversions feel to look at. In Ask Alexa she takes us on an intimate journey through the place where her art meets her life.