{"id":83083,"date":"2026-04-14T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=83083"},"modified":"2026-04-13T17:30:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T23:30:06","slug":"she-invented-a-dark-tale-about-fame-fandom-and-young-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/she-invented-a-dark-tale-about-fame-fandom-and-young-women\/","title":{"rendered":"She invented a dark tale about fame, fandom and young women"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"She<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Petra Collins suggested we meet at one of her favorite spots, the Little Tokyo Galleria in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as we stepped through the mall\u2019s sliding glass doors it immediately became clear why she loves the place. The din elicited a tectonic feeling as flocks of teenagers perused racks of vintage clothes outside the Daiso supermarket, lined up for tattoos, handmade hair clips, anime stickers and pastel jewelry boxes made to look like tiny sheet cakes. That thrilling suffusion of bright, synesthetic noise evokes not only the state of Ms. Collins\u2019s mind, but also the lens through which she often sees the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Collins grants us access to that suffusion with her new book \u201cSTAR,\u201d which Rizzoli publishes on Tuesday. \u201cSTAR\u201d is a series of original photographs that present the story of a fictional pop star as she becomes entangled with an Asian pop group and offers a lurid take on fame and fandom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of the five chapters is named after a pop song from the 1990s or 2000s \u2014 \u201cLucky,\u201d \u201cErase\/Rewind,\u201d \u201cWhite Flag,\u201d \u201cPerfect Day\u201d and \u201cPiece of Me\u201d \u2014 and follows Ashley, a quiet student catapulted into solo stardom alongside Siren8, a girl group she tours with until mysteriously vanishing. The story is recounted in a style reminiscent of \u201cRashomon,\u201d using a number of unreliable sources, including an obsessed, possibly dangerous fan, and Yuyu, Ashley\u2019s closest friend, who surfaces in online forums years after the singer\u2019s disappearance and tries to correct the record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visually, \u201cSTAR\u201d represents a deliberate return to what Ms. Collins calls the \u201cflowy and na\u00efve\u201d approach of her early work. Unstudied, imperfect and diffuse, the images \u2014 alongside bits of spare, inscrutable prose \u2014 collectively present a new version of a story Ms. Collins has been telling since she was 15, about the unblinking eye trained on girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSTAR\u201d reads less like a book and more like a blueprint for a film, which is fitting because Ms. Collins has always yearned to direct one, and has begun working on her first feature (details under wraps for now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original idea for \u201cSTAR\u201d was inspired, in part, by another one of Ms. Collins\u2019s other projects, a book series entitled \u201cOMG, I\u2019m Being Killed,\u201d in which she repurposed rejected commissioned work as new art. The original brief from a client came with the prompt: What is femininity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cObviously a lot of my work was about girlhood, but it\u2019s such a difficult dark thing, and I can\u2019t explain it to anyone in a 100 percent positive light,\u201d Ms. Collins said. \u201cMy book is about femininity, and it is dark. That\u2019s how I see it. And that is how it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Collins, 33, said she had been on TikTok and felt overwhelmed to the point of defeat by the onslaught of negative imagery for girls and women. She believed it had only grown worse compared with when she was growing up in the 2000s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never been hit on as much as I was when I was 12 or 13,\u201d she said. \u201cI remember the first time it happened. I was walking to get the subway to school and two men were like, \u2018Beautiful legs. What do you do? Are you a model?\u2019\u201d I remember the feeling, you know, guilt and shame. And it\u2019s worse now. I\u2019m so sick of it\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Does Petra Collins Do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more than half of her life, Ms. Collins\u2019s images have captured a Gen Y aesthetic. She was a prominent subject and collaborator of the photographer Ryan McGinley and the de facto house photographer for Rookie, Tavi Gevinson\u2019s 2010\u2019s digital teen-girl bible. More recently, she has been directing music videos for Olivia Rodrigo, Selena Gomez and Cardi B among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Collins, who grew up in Toronto, began taking photographs in high school, shooting professionally for Vice magazine when she was a senior in 2010. That year, she founded the Ardorous, a feminist artist collective and online gallery that gave young artists a key hub in the early days of internet art culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Ms. Collins is that rare photographer who has also spent a good deal of time on the other side of the camera. She was part of the electric cast of wayward innocents streaking under sparkler-lit night skies in Ryan McGinley\u2019s \u201cRoadtrip\u201d photo series, which was taken during their cross-country trip in 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Collins also works as a model: She walked the runway for Gucci in 2016 and is currently a face of Chemena Kamali\u2019s Chlo\u00e9. In fact, Ms. Collins explained she was feeling a bit dazed wandering around the Galleria. She had just returned from Paris fashion week, where she was as a social media correspondent for Miu Miu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. McGinley, who has known Ms. Collins since she was a teenager, has said the most common thing people ask about her is, What exactly does she do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short answer is a lot. As Mr. McGinley explained in an email, \u201cPetra is an artist that moves effortlessly between fine art, fashion and pop stars.\u201d He added that the two share a siblinglike bond and have a \u201cshorthand when we talk\u201d about creative life. This might explain how he can, as he put it, \u201csee the thread through all Petra\u2019s magnificent work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Collins believes the descriptor that fits her best is curator. In fact, she briefly studied art curation at Ontario College of Art and Design before dropping out and moving to New York when she was 20.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI love picking out works and having them have conversations with each other,\u201d Ms. Collins said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Ms. Collins does not have a studio, \u201cbecause I\u2019m like, what am I going to do in there?\u201d Even curator doesn\u2019t feel fully accurate to her. Ask the question another way: What is her process? How does she document it when she has a new idea?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d she said, laughing. \u201cI just have them in my head and then I\u2019m like \u2026\u201d she trails off. \u201cIt\u2019s really messy. If I write an idea down it\u2019s like it disappears.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything Is a Blur<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petra Collins early photographic signature, and the aesthetic with which she is most associated, is a woozy, neon vision of a smudged teenage girlhood. It was initially less a deliberate construction and more a byproduct of a practical reality: She couldn\u2019t see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have crazy bad eyesight, like two prescriptions away from legally blind,\u201d she said. \u201cAs a kid I would have so many dreams of going blind.\u201d Her poor vision is one reason she started taking photographs. \u201cI was like, I need to see! I know people are like, Petra Collins wipe off your lens, but when I was like 15, 16, didn\u2019t have glasses. So in a lot of the early work the softness comes from literally not being able to see properly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is also a blur that comes from a sense of dislocation. Hungarian is Ms. Collins\u2019s first language; she was enrolled in an English as a second language program and \u201creally struggled in school,\u201d which made her feel alienated from her peers. As an adult, that feeling has stuck with her now that she is not in touch with her parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Ms. Collins has spoken in the past about her family to The New Yorker \u2014 her father was a former criminal lawyer who ran a hosiery shop, where he met her mother, a Hungarian refugee, after she emigrated to Canada \u2014 she no longer speaks of them directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s \u201cfrustrating,\u201d she said, to keep that part of her life locked away because so much of her work is informed by the abuse she endured as a young person and the experience of growing up in an unstable home (the family was evicted at one point).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Ms. Collins remains extremely close with her younger sister, Anna, a dancer and movement specialist who works with Parkinson\u2019s disease patients, and to whom Petra refers as her \u201cfirst and forever muse.\u201d Ms. Collins is recently engaged to Jake Nadrich, a composer, and Anna was just engaged to one of Mr. Nadrich\u2019s childhood friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m like, if there is a God, this is the end of the cycle of trauma, and we\u2019ve created our own little family and that\u2019s that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first picture Ms. Collins took that made her realize the psychedelic potential of photography featured their friends in Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey were sitting at the end of my bed, and they were smoking a cigarette,\u201d she said. Because it was very bright in the room, Ms. Collins assumed the photos would be, too. Instead, \u201cthey were so visually dark. I mean, I cast something onto them, and they also projected something back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There seems to be a nearly permanent tension in Ms. Collins and her work between hope and despair, between a primal, willful joy and a connection to and awareness of an omnipotent, undefeatable male gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That photo, \u201cIn My Bed,\u201d was shot 17 years ago, but Ms. Collins said her work was still animated by the same impulse to use her camera as a way to view her life. The results, she said, have never matched what she imagines in her head. This could sound terrifying to some artists, but to her, it has only been a source of wonder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery time, it\u2019s still such a treat to get the photos back to see what was really going on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n