Allen Frame Interviews Colleen Longo Collins

AF: Where did you grow up and why is there such a strong Film Noir atmosphere in your work?

CLC: I was born in Santa Monica, California and grew up in a modest, eccentric home in Los Angeles, near Wilshire and Hancock Park. My grandparents were nearby, on both sides. They each oozed glamour in their own ways.

The Longos, my paternal Italian lineage, loved to dance, sing and be merry. My grandfather, Mr. Frank Joseph Longo, sold life insurance to Hollywood starlets in the 40s and 50s. He had an office in the backyard of his property where black and white headshots of Shirley Temple and the like hung in tiny wooden and metal frames, side by side, from the ceiling and across the room. 

Back home a few blocks away, Tommy Longo, my father, would always have on American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies. I was raised on AMC and TCM. The hits Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Some Like It Hot, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, seemed to always be heard echoing throughout the house. The silver screen, shiny, pin-curled hair, and glowing studio lights all sucked me in. I loved the glamour and the drama, the silliness and wit, the way the women always seemed to have to play down their intellect and scheming ways, because everyone was distracted by their looks and charms. That was home.

At 13 my father bought me my first Nikon 35mm camera. I became so fascinated with my girlfriends. I always wanted to have lots of women around me, as surrogate sisters, aunties or cousins. I studied them, for clues about womanhood, femininity, sexuality, vulnerability.

For me, Film Noir has to do with the nature of seduction through mystery, luring the viewer through elusiveness and dreamy landscapes found in dimly lit corners.

AF: I know that part of your process involves visiting your friends, wherever they might be—Cranbrook, Michigan, California, or New York. Can you talk about those visits and how you work with your subjects?

CLC: I learned by the end of college, and maybe even as far back as high school, that I could make close girlfriends, share loads of adventures and exchange sacred time together. As life continued, they or I would move away from such close proximity. During my MFA at Pratt, not only was I clear across the country from where I grew up in California, but a handful of my artistic community also moved to new places.

As soon as I could find the time, I would book a trip to go and visit my muses. These female artists, old and new friends, became the subject for this black and white film work. I would show up and get the lowdown about what was going on in their lives, tour their home, backyard, bedroom, or childhood stomping grounds. Soon their properties would begin to reveal the story, the atmosphere of overgrown ivy, the 50-year-old brick wall. The attics and hallways became the backdrops to evoke a sense of time and place that was shot in the moment but could evoke memories of female youth exploring womanhood.

AF: I want to talk more about the atmosphere at work. There’s such a strong mood. Gesture and an intimate sense of the body are much more important to you than any clear descriptions of the face or context. This approach intensifies the cinematic feeling of the work. What are the cinematic influences on it besides Film Noir?

CLC: The Films: Virgin Suicides; The Diane Arbus Story, Fur; Interview with the Vampire; The Secretary; Almost Famous; Cry Baby; American Beauty.

Growing up in Hollywood in the 80s felt very riddled with nostalgia, a city so enthralled with glamour and glitz pre-internet. There was a lot happening in my world, and in the early 90s that included Madonna’s SEX book and En Vogue’s Funky Divas.

I think I was exposed to a lot of sexually advanced materials at a young age—Playboy Magazine, performance art, movies on cable—that influenced my confidence in my school girl years and heightened my sense of femininity and ways of presenting attractiveness. And not just in how you do makeup or hair, but how you get dressed, how you hold yourself in public, how a woman can be both the wallflower and the vixen.  It shapes how she expresses both her wild, evocative nature and dreamy nymphness.

AF: What are the qualities that draw you to the particular women that you photograph?

CLC: Trust. Trust between us allows me to ask them to float in water, jump in the air or lie topless in awkward positions, or even delight in the reverie when I want to dress them up like dolls. I am attracted to long dark manes. As a dirty blond, the raven-haired women always seemed more mysterious and slightly lascivious. I am drawn to a mutual attraction to art and music, performance and storytelling. The greatest quality is their willingness; their acceptance of me that allows me to show up to their home or studio and be able to pull elements together that are already familiar to them so they feel a sense of ease and grace in their private spaces, allowing me to walk around and wonder, peruse and gather details that speak to my story as well as theirs.

AF: What do you mean by Tenacious Nostalgia, a term you’ve used to title the series on your website?

CLC: It is a term I read in the book 100 Years of Solitude at a time in my life when I realized how much the past was influencing my present story. Either the recent past decade of my teens, or the greater past of my parents' youth, and further back, when my grandparents were coming of age, and ultimately connecting to my female ancestors. I’ve thought about having the tenacity to—day in and day out—incorporate everything that has come before me and honor those histories, past lives, and generational pass-downs. 

I am suggesting that women in their 20s are still very much attached to the female in them from 16 or even 10 years old. That women in their 30s are still looking at what they experienced in their 20s and seeing how much they have learned and how many lessons and explorations are yet to come. Women have such an intense story of coming into their own power without giving up their vulnerability that to be making art as a woman, about women, of women, feels like an act of conscious liberation.

Making this work in the 2000s felt isolated, in a way. These photographs are not airbrushed, or Photoshopped, or puffed up or stretched out. The black and white film has such a forgiving quality to the skin and atmosphere. For me, it can transcend the past and the present, so that future viewers of this work may not have an immediate timestamp of when this work was made. I believe its “sentiment” comes across as familiar, like a cherished memory or intimate feeling.