Artist References

William Collie

Overview – William Collie was one of the first photographers to use Fox Talbot’s calotype process in Jersey. Collie was originally born in Skene, Aberdeenshire, Scotland in October 1810 and like many other early photographers, started his professional life as a portrait painter. He moved south and is recorded as living in St Helier, Jersey, before 1841, where he had a portrait business. He became one of the earliest photographers working in the Channel Islands, operating from Belmont House, St Helier, until 1872. In the late 1840s he made a series of genre calotype portraits depicting ‘French and Jersey Market Women’.

Image Analysis –

Michelle Sank – Insula

Overview – Sank is well known for her ‘youth work’ among other projects: thematic series of portraits of young adults, often those dealing with an adolescent struggle to find their place in the world or define their identity. Her ability to evoke these human states through a direct yet deceptively potent vision. Writing about Sank’s work, the photographer David Goldblatt has observed: “Michelle Sank uses a simplicity of means that falls way below the zealous art critic’s qualifying level for success. She attempts a portraiture in which the familiar is rendered quietly, never bizarrely, new.’ Her subjects ‘seem, completely, themselves; Sank has allowed each one of them simply to be. Yet it is not a passive state, something has been evoked that seems to come from deep within…an essence which is not ordinary at all. It is the unique spirit of the other person.”