JTF (just the facts): Published in 2026 by Rizzoli (here). Hardcover (10.5 × 7 inches), 176 pages, with 160 color reproductions. Design by Sandra Leko. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: Petra Collins is a New York–based Canadian artist whose work emerged from the early visual cultures of Tumblr and Instagram, where she began translating her personal experiences of girlhood into images. Her photographs are marked by a soft, dreamlike aesthetic that foregrounds adolescence, intimacy, and the ambiguities of contemporary femininity. As a teenager, Collins co‑founded The Ardorous, an online collective that brought together young women artists and offered an unmediated view of teenage life, resisting polished or eroticized portrayals in favor of emotional honesty and vulnerability. Since then, her practice has expanded well beyond photography to include exhibition-making, fashion collaborations, music video direction, filmmaking, and publishing, establishing her as a key figure shaping visual culture at the intersection of art, pop, and youth experience.
Collins’ new photobook STAR continues her long-standing engagement with girlhood, image-making, and self-presentation. The book’s narrative is open and fluid, but it still feels intentional and carefully shaped. Across five chapters, the story moves between two poles of pop stardom: Ashley, a singular breakout figure, and Siren8, a manufactured teen idol group built for glossy, bubblegum consumption. Ashley (never fully fixed as autobiographical or fictional) begins as a quiet, creative student who is discovered during a school performance and quickly pulled into the machinery of pop fame. At first she appears sincere and gentle, but as her career advances, her sense of self becomes increasingly distorted. Isolated, manipulated, and emotionally detached, she grows distant from the people who knew her before, eventually disappearing under unexplained circumstances.
STAR is a compact, horizontally oriented photobook. Its cover is dominated by a close-up portrait of a woman wearing glittery blue eye makeup as she applies glossy pink lipstick. To the right, a large silver star, equally glittered, anchors the composition, with the artist’s name and the title set along its edges in a matching metallic tone. The endpapers feature a collage of cut-out images and text, leading into a sequence of vivid pink pages and a table of contents outlining five chapters. Throughout the book, the photographs are printed full bleed, creating a continuous, cinematic flow. Each chapter opens with a pink spread accompanied by a brief text, establishing both rhythm and structure. Overall, the book feels cohesive, vibrant, and immersive, with a strong visual identity that blends glamour, intimacy, and a carefully paced narrative progression.
Siren8 serves as a contrast to Ashley’s carefully crafted “dreamy girl-next-door” image. They tour together early on, until an abrupt and unclear break occurs. Vuyu, Ashley’s reserved and protective best friend, is one of the few people who knew her before fame and later appears anonymously in online forums to challenge inaccuracies and rumors. Momo, a deeply invested fan, documents Ashley’s life through exhaustive online research, creating a widely shared timeline that unintentionally underscores how much of Ashley has been lost to public narrative. B, a socially isolated student from Ashley’s school, becomes fixated on her as a figure of sincerity and meaning, writing numerous letters in the belief that she is helping. Over time, that fixation escalates, revealing how devotion can slowly turn unsettling.
Visually, STAR stays close to Collins’s established aesthetic: soft lighting, carefully composed scenes, and an emphasis on mood over narrative clarity. The photographs oscillate between glossy, high‑production tableaux and raw, diaristic fragments, creating a rhythm that feels both cinematic and deeply personal. In one spread, the protagonist appears as a shimmering idol, bathed in synthetic light; in the next, she is collapsed on a bed, mascara smudged, the glamour cracked open. Collins isn’t simply documenting a character; she is dissecting the cultural machinery that produces her, the pressures that distort her, and the fantasies projected onto her. The result is a portrait that is as much about the viewer as it is about the viewed.
Collins understands that in contemporary culture, beauty is both currency and trap, and she uses that tension to destabilize the viewer. The book’s most striking images are the ones where the artifice becomes impossible to ignore: the staged breakdowns, the hyper‑stylized performances of vulnerability, the moments where the protagonist seems to be watching herself from outside her own body. These are not simply photographs of a star, they are photographs about the idea of stardom itself.
The sequencing of STAR is one of its quiet triumphs. Collins moves fluidly between registers (glamour, horror, tenderness, satire etc) without ever losing the thread of the narrative. The book feels like a pop album in visual form, complete with crescendos, breakdowns, and refrains. There are moments of pure theater, where the images explode with color and theatricality, and moments of startling intimacy, where the façade drops and something raw flickers through. Collins understands pacing not just as a structural tool but as an emotional one, and she uses it to guide the viewer through the protagonist’s transformation. The result is a book that feels immersive, almost hypnotic, pulling the viewer deeper into its world with each turn of the page.
STAR stands as Collins’s most fully realized articulation of her ongoing project: a dismantling and reassembly of the visual codes that shape contemporary femininity. It is a book that also feels eerily attuned to the present moment, when the boundaries between self, image, and performance have become increasingly porous. Ultimately, STAR offers a sharp study of the cultural forces that both manufacture desire and relentlessly consume it.
Collector’s POV: Petra Collins does not appear to have consistent gallery representation at this time. As a result, interested collectors should likely follow up directly with the artist via her website (linked in the sidebar).
