You can always tell when an image has been shot by Toronto-raised photographer Petra Collins. “It’s just what’s inside me,” she told the Star. “It’s what needed to get out.”
At 33, Collins has a resume of a veteran. She’s shot some of the most resonant music videos of the past decade, including Selena Gomez’s “Fetish” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u,” which earned Collins a Grammy nomination.
She’s photographed campaigns for major fashion brands such as Gucci, Miu Miu and Jean Paul Gaultier. Her work has been exhibited internationally since her teens, and it inspired the glimmering visual esthetic of “Euphoria.”
Her creative hunger remains insatiable, and now it’s led to her to publish her seventh book, “Star” (out now through Rizzoli Books), a visual exploration of a fictional girl pop group and the dark side of their fandom.
“I feel like my life has been a big pinch-me moment. I went from shooting in my bedroom at 15 to doing this for life,” Collins said. She’s speaking via video call from her home in Los Angeles, where she’s been based for about six years.
She sits in her office before a glass display cabinet filled with antique trinkets that feel uniquely Petra, delicate tokens of girlhood and femininity tinged with nostalgia — motifs that have become synonymous with her distinctive vision.
Originally, Collins trained to become a ballerina, but a sudden injury cut that plan short. She aspired to make movies, and began taking photographs as a stepping stone into film. “Photography was an easier way to capture narrative in one shot and frame,” she said. “Back then, I jumped from medium to medium, and that’s the one that stuck.”
At 15, she landed a gig shooting for Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie, the now-defunct online magazine created for and by teenagers. There, she had the freedom to get scrappy, experiment with shoots, develop her own ideas and execute them.
Growing up in Toronto — Collins lived here until age 20, when she decamped to New York — shaped her creative perspective. She was drawn to the city’s brutalist architecture and appearance as a cinematic backdrop in the David Cronenberg films she loves.
Her Hungarian roots informed her attraction to those concrete vistas. “My family lived under the Soviet regime, where similar structures and building styles were everywhere,” she said. “A lot of these spaces really inspired me, as well as the access to nature. You’re able to shoot in these urban places while also having access to parks and water.” Her favourite spot in the city remains the Toronto Reference Library. “It’s so esthetically pleasing and has history, which is great for the creative mind.”
Today, her visual style blends vulnerability, surrealism and emotional candour, which all merge in her new book. “Star” is part images, part letters and part diary entries that examine megafandom. “I’ve always been fascinated by people viewed on such a mass scale, so this idea of being watched and surveilled goes into the imagery,” she said.
Collins grew up in the frenzied era of pop stardom in the early 2000s. When she began collaborating with musicians like Rosalia, Cardi B, Frank Ocean and Tyler the Creator, she was exposed to the real complexities and downsides of fandom. These tensions run through the book in abstract ways. “There’s no narrator,” she said. “It could be the fans or the stalker.”
Collins assembled “Star” the way she would edit a film, scavenging through thousands of photos and whittling them down to 176 pages. “I was cutting and figuring out how the story would land or what beats I wanted in there,” Collins said. “All the images can stand alone, but they can also tell a story together — and it can even be read backwards.”
There are depictions of performances, confrontations and rescues, but Collins doesn’t frame “Star” as a critique or cautionary tale. Instead, it’s an examination of the changing ways we interact with and navigate fame. “While we don’t explicitly have phones in the book, it explores that whole online experience and how we see each other through this lens and how there is no sense of boundaries anymore.”
That extends to her view on girlhood. Collins, whose work has long examined youthful femininity, defines the experience as “horrifying.” “It’s very difficult to be a woman, or a young woman, and it’s always been that way. It feels like it’s getting scarier and scarier.”
She recently watched “The Testaments” — Margaret Atwood’s dystopian followup to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” about young women coming of age under authoritative rule — and says it comes to mind when she thinks about this time in girls’ lives. “There’s something really lovely about it, but I think we really need to work on protecting young women. As much as we’ve moved forward, we’ve also moved backwards.”
Behind the beauty of Collins’ work lies something darker, and often it’s the truth. Adulation and unease, intimacy and performance, fantasy and horror collapse into one another, revealing the reality behind the glossy facade.
