Anna Fox Resort 2
Born in 1961 and completing her degree in Audio Visual studies at The Surrey Institute, Farnham in 1986, Anna Fox has been working in photography and video for over thirty years. Influenced by the British documentary tradition and US ‘New Colourists’, her first work Work Stations (published by and exhibited first at Camerawork, London 1988) observed, with a critical eye, London office culture in the mid-Thatcher years. Her later work documenting weekend war games, Friendly Fire, was showcased in the exhibition Warworks at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Netherlands Foto Institute and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her solo shows have been seen at The Photographers’ Gallery and James Hyman Gallery, London and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Her work has also been included in numerous international group shows. Anna Fox is Professor of Photography at the University for Creative Arts, Farnham (UK).
For two years British photographer Anna Fox
The first book, Resort 1, published by Schilt in 2011,
documented holiday and party culture at the iconic
documented family holidays at the Bognor Regis camp,
Butlin’s resort in the seaside town of Bognor Regis,
and accompanied a touring exhibition of the work. This
West Sussex. The work marked the 75th anniversary
second book, Resort 2, records the adult themed
of this leisure brand, and provided a unique insight
weekend parties, such as Back to the 60s and 90s
into contemporary British holiday culture. Butlin’s is
Reloaded, that are fast becoming as legendary as the
a British institution and an established cultural
family breaks at Butlin’s. Shot in both medium and large
phenomenon, with a very particular character, history
format with hand-held flash, Fox’s highly coloured
and identity. Having attracted tens of millions of
photographs provide a fascinating update to a holiday
holidaymakers since its creation in 1936, the
icon most often associated with the golden era of British
popularity of Butlin’s peaked in the 1970s, but today
seaside culture and with family holidays.
it remains a thriving centre for family holidays and
Resort 2 includes 46 photographs from the series,
themed leisure breaks.
with an essay by David Chandler.
www.schiltpublishing.com
omslag .indd 1
Anna Fox Resort 2
12-01-15 15:16
8 | Caption, date
Friends, 2009 |
9
8 | Caption, date
Friends, 2009 |
9
Parades Go By David Chandler
David Chandler is a writer, curator and editor. He was Assistant Curator of Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London (19821988); Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (1991-1995); Projects Manager at the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) (1995-1997); and, from 1997 to 2010, Director of Photoworks, Brighton. He has written widely on photography and the visual arts for many books and journals and is currently Professor of Photography at Plymouth University.
The calcified face that, at the time of writing, stares out from the homepage of Anna Fox’s website is a characteristically unsettling and sinister invitation to her world of photographs. There is an initial jolt, and maybe a moment’s misrecognition, in seeing the strange lifelikeness of the face that pushes towards us from the shadows. But what is more disturbing is how a sense of life seems to linger in that vacant look and Mona Lisa smile; how, even as we acknowledge the hardened, pink-painted creases of the eyelids and the dead glassy eyes of the wax model, something human still seems to emanate from it. Fox’s close-up flash photograph cleverly dramatizes this unnerving sense, and as always with her work there is some dark comedy in this. But it is not entirely the subject of the photograph. As the camera forensically scrutinises the face, what registers is evidence of the painstaking effort to represent, and reproduce, human physiognomy, something that the photograph suggests joins the model’s maker, the photographer and now us, the viewers, in a cycle of morbid fascination and attraction. The staring face of the wax model, that hovers so peculiarly between the animate and the inanimate, that seems to conceal, even trap life inside its life-less mask, is an apt and uncanny gate-keeper of Anna Fox’s work. It invites us in and warns us, too, that all is not what it might seem. Like the Surrealists, who were similarly moved by wax models, dolls and mannequins, and for whom these things represented a
paradigm of ‘marvellous’ beauty, a fusion of dream and reality, what Louis Aragon called, ‘the eruption of contradiction within the real’11, Fox is drawn to those zones of liberating uncertainty, where the surfaces of reality and identity are rearranged, and where the idea of authenticity itself comes into question. For her, appearances are deceptive: across our social world – and especially within the still heavily class-defined culture of Britain – genuine emotions, values, desires tend to remain hidden. And yet it is not the emotions themselves but the processes of concealment and revelation that hold Fox’s attention. The play of social conformity, the masquerade, the effort to construct or uphold a fragile personal image – one prone to break down or be wilfully transgressed – this has been the abiding subject of her photography. And, as Freud suggested, there is nothing so potentially strange as that which is most familiar; the uncanny lurks most powerfully in the most banal, everyday situations, a repressed trauma from the past may erupt more subversively when the present is apparently comfortable and a sense of contingent reality is suppressed. In its particular method of investigation, Fox’s probing of just this familiar, everyday world, the ‘ordinary life’ of contemporary Britain, has taken many forms over the years: photojournalism, social documentary, domestic chronicle, portraiture, and more recently digitally enhanced tableau. And
her subjects have ranged across the social spectrum: from codes of behaviour in the office environments of Thatcher’s Britain to the respectable manners of rural communities; from the bombsite aftermaths of raves to her own domestic surroundings and experiences, where she often ironically and shambolically mimics conventional rituals and polite standards. Throughout this work Anna Fox has been a roving presence, a performer, coming in and out of view, hiding and revealing herself – sometimes in full, coruscating detail. Her camera is capable of peeling away the social veneers, highlighting incriminating body language missed by the naked eye, turning the respectable into the grotesque. But as often it has been a dispassionate witness, the stable centre amid a chaotic passing show of charades, acts, costumes and ceremonies; remaining focused even as the photographer sways to the motion of the party. Resort 2 is another chapter in this unfolding narrative. It is the second book of photographs from Fox’s work at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Bognor Regis, made between 2009 and 2011, and differs considerably in tone from the first, Resort 1, published in 2013. In my essay for that first book, I looked at the ambiguous impression of the holiday camp in the British imagination, and at the way Fox had responded to its most recent incarnation in Bognor Regis by developing what was for her a new kind of imagery, one that used the theatricalised photographs from the John
Hampshire village church, A History of Local Wedding Dress 2006, from the series Back to the Village. © Anna Fox
11
58 | Picnic, 2010
Caption, date
Parades Go By David Chandler
David Chandler is a writer, curator and editor. He was Assistant Curator of Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London (19821988); Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (1991-1995); Projects Manager at the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) (1995-1997); and, from 1997 to 2010, Director of Photoworks, Brighton. He has written widely on photography and the visual arts for many books and journals and is currently Professor of Photography at Plymouth University.
The calcified face that, at the time of writing, stares out from the homepage of Anna Fox’s website is a characteristically unsettling and sinister invitation to her world of photographs. There is an initial jolt, and maybe a moment’s misrecognition, in seeing the strange lifelikeness of the face that pushes towards us from the shadows. But what is more disturbing is how a sense of life seems to linger in that vacant look and Mona Lisa smile; how, even as we acknowledge the hardened, pink-painted creases of the eyelids and the dead glassy eyes of the wax model, something human still seems to emanate from it. Fox’s close-up flash photograph cleverly dramatizes this unnerving sense, and as always with her work there is some dark comedy in this. But it is not entirely the subject of the photograph. As the camera forensically scrutinises the face, what registers is evidence of the painstaking effort to represent, and reproduce, human physiognomy, something that the photograph suggests joins the model’s maker, the photographer and now us, the viewers, in a cycle of morbid fascination and attraction. The staring face of the wax model, that hovers so peculiarly between the animate and the inanimate, that seems to conceal, even trap life inside its life-less mask, is an apt and uncanny gate-keeper of Anna Fox’s work. It invites us in and warns us, too, that all is not what it might seem. Like the Surrealists, who were similarly moved by wax models, dolls and mannequins, and for whom these things represented a
paradigm of ‘marvellous’ beauty, a fusion of dream and reality, what Louis Aragon called, ‘the eruption of contradiction within the real’11, Fox is drawn to those zones of liberating uncertainty, where the surfaces of reality and identity are rearranged, and where the idea of authenticity itself comes into question. For her, appearances are deceptive: across our social world – and especially within the still heavily class-defined culture of Britain – genuine emotions, values, desires tend to remain hidden. And yet it is not the emotions themselves but the processes of concealment and revelation that hold Fox’s attention. The play of social conformity, the masquerade, the effort to construct or uphold a fragile personal image – one prone to break down or be wilfully transgressed – this has been the abiding subject of her photography. And, as Freud suggested, there is nothing so potentially strange as that which is most familiar; the uncanny lurks most powerfully in the most banal, everyday situations, a repressed trauma from the past may erupt more subversively when the present is apparently comfortable and a sense of contingent reality is suppressed. In its particular method of investigation, Fox’s probing of just this familiar, everyday world, the ‘ordinary life’ of contemporary Britain, has taken many forms over the years: photojournalism, social documentary, domestic chronicle, portraiture, and more recently digitally enhanced tableau. And
her subjects have ranged across the social spectrum: from codes of behaviour in the office environments of Thatcher’s Britain to the respectable manners of rural communities; from the bombsite aftermaths of raves to her own domestic surroundings and experiences, where she often ironically and shambolically mimics conventional rituals and polite standards. Throughout this work Anna Fox has been a roving presence, a performer, coming in and out of view, hiding and revealing herself – sometimes in full, coruscating detail. Her camera is capable of peeling away the social veneers, highlighting incriminating body language missed by the naked eye, turning the respectable into the grotesque. But as often it has been a dispassionate witness, the stable centre amid a chaotic passing show of charades, acts, costumes and ceremonies; remaining focused even as the photographer sways to the motion of the party. Resort 2 is another chapter in this unfolding narrative. It is the second book of photographs from Fox’s work at the Butlin’s holiday camp in Bognor Regis, made between 2009 and 2011, and differs considerably in tone from the first, Resort 1, published in 2013. In my essay for that first book, I looked at the ambiguous impression of the holiday camp in the British imagination, and at the way Fox had responded to its most recent incarnation in Bognor Regis by developing what was for her a new kind of imagery, one that used the theatricalised photographs from the John
Hampshire village church, A History of Local Wedding Dress 2006, from the series Back to the Village. © Anna Fox
11
| Bar Rosso, 2011
Schoolgirls, 2009 |
27
| Bar Rosso, 2011
Schoolgirls, 2009 |
27
28 | Beehive, 2009
28 | Beehive, 2009
30 | Men in dresses, 2009
Caption, date
30 | Men in dresses, 2009
Caption, date
44 | T in Man, 2009
44 | T in Man, 2009
42 | Zombie, 2009
42 | Zombie, 2009
58 | Picnic, 2010
Caption, date