About Barbara Collins

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A lover of photography and a 37-year resident of Palo Alto, Barbara Collins wanted to reminisce about the building that currently houses Borders Books & Music.

"I wanted to do a series of photos on what was once the New Varsity Theatre," she said.

"It's gone through a lot of changes, and I just wanted to remind those people . . . a little bit of what it had been and what it had become," she said.

She used to go to the courtyard and listen to performers like Tuck & Patti, guitarists and various jazz musicians.

"They drew quite a crowd in the summer," she said. "The whole venue reminded me of what Palo Alto used to be like. It was just another bygone era."

There was an alley where high school kids would paint, she said.

"There was a lot of interesting graffiti that had been there."

Her collage is a picture of the back entrance to the building that she took in early 2007. She combined the recent photograph with pictures of people in the building she took in the 1980s, she said.

"I would lighten the opacity of them (the photographs), and then I altered some of the shapes in them with the tools available in Photoshop."

Collins spends a lot of time working on her photography.

"I'm a very visual person and its a way of capturing what I have seen," she said. "It also allows me to explore it further after I am no longer in that in place."

--Susan Hong