Anna Fox shares images from 2 of her new photography projects & discusses collaborating with Karen Knorr

From The Village, 1991

Usually when you ask a photographer to describe their practice you get a short, sometimes terse, answer but not with Anna Fox. As befits an internationally admired photographer and a Professor of Photography, you get a nuanced reply.

“When I started, I would have called myself simply a documentary photographer but now I call myself a storytelling photographer because it seems to encapsulate a bit more. Everything that I do has a narrative embedded in it: I don’t aim to make single images, I work in series often with sound or text.”

“Photography is a language and a way of telling stories about the world that maybe you can’t speak.”

Anna Fox’s work is known for its strong use of colour enhanced with bold flash, and her early work in London offices, with paint ball teams or village life was a direct challenge to the prevailing use of black & white. It was noted as an ‘important part of the second wave of British documentary photography’.

Fox has published several acclaimed monographs, including Zwarte Piet, and Resort 1. She is Professor of Photography at UCA Farnham where she leads the MFA photography programme: a return to her roots, as she studied here under Martin Parr, Paul Graham and Karen Knorr. 

Long term documentary photography projects

Fox is known for working on long term documentary projects, creating photo essays or stories that may be realised as installations, as with the Village, or slideshows, exhibitions or in book form. She often has multiple projects on the go, and today she’s talking to us about two of them: U.S.1. and Cabinet.

Working with Karen Knorr

Like much of her work, U.S.1. is a collaboration, in this case with Karen Knorr. Fox was as student at Farnham and Knorr a tutor when they first met, “Karen was just bursting into the world in the late 70’s and early 80’s with her work on punks (which wasn’t actually published until much later), and Belgravia”. Fast forward many years and Fox and Knorr are firm friends who are happy working together.

The project they’re collaborating on is called U.S.1. and is based on the work of Berenice Abbott, a photographer they both admire. “We were looking at her Route One work and felt that it wasn’t known enough, which is shocking because she was such a great photographer. Other people from that era particularly the guys, are much better known.”

From U.S.1

Together Fox and Knorr are retracing Abbott’s journey from Key West to Maine, looking at politics and social conditions. The work was originally conceived as a series of landscapes but more recently, they have been also shooting portraits. They’re just back from a shoot in the USA, and during the couple of years the project has been running, they’ve found a collaborative way of working.

They shoot on similar equipment and spend the day working beside or near one another, each looking at slightly different things. “And then in the evenings we look at the work over dinner, and we’ve found that we’ve come to a collision of styles. We’re both interested in the same socio political things to do with people’s lives and the economy and how issues like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo affect people. But we do get a little bit competitive as well, which makes you work harder.”

Combining text and photographs

The plan is for the work to end up a book or even a slideshow but as you might imagine for a work by photographers who are so sensitive to the use of text, there’s also a plan to incorporate words in some way. “I’m interested in text as an art form and I like to treat it the same way as I treat taking pictures. It’s a joyful thing to play with and it gives an extra layer of complication to work in a way that can be really interesting. But I don’t particularly like it when it’s used just to explain something.”

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

From U.S.1

Collaborating on photography projects

The collaboration with Karen Knorr isn’t an unusual way of working for Anna Fox. Over the course of her career she’s produced work with musician Alison Goldfrapp, 80’s punk Linda Lunus and more recently, artist Helen Sear. In some ways her other active project is also a collaboration, this time with her mother.

Untitled, from the series Country Girls, 2001

Untitled, from the series Country Girls, 2001

Untitled, from the series Country Girls, 2001

Photographing grief

Cabinet is a collection of ideas that’s loosely based around grief and the ways that people experience it. “After my mother died, she had this amazing miniatures cabinet with lots of objects that she had collected throughout her life. It was quite an eccentric collection with some things that might be valuable and some that were quite bizarre, like a made-up letter that she’d written to herself from an imaginary Chinese man.”

With closer investigation of the cabinet, the ambiguity deepened, with the discovery of a novel that was the foretelling of her grand daughter’s life, and pinned to the back of the cabinet, a tiny booklet listing each object. Fox decided to photograph it but felt unsure whether she was allowed to. “I just put the objects on my mother’s un–made bed (the last place she slept upstairs) and photographed them one by one, then the miniature novel and the booklet, like a minute archive. At the end I photographed the bed and the cabinet. These two images both came out blurry because I was panicking about doing it quickly – I quite liked this.”

Part of this project’s challenge is to find the correct the medium to display it. At the moment she’s working out how to deal with the scale of the miniature items, trying to understand how the scale of something tiny will look when reproduced as a large print or in a book. “I like to see the work either in the book form or in the exhibition form because I take a lot of time to work out how that should be. Locked in every piece of work that I make, is the solution of how it’s contextualized and that becomes part of the meaning”. These works will be small – it is just how small she is still deciding.

The cabinet

The bed

The booklet 1

The novel a

Object number 46

Object part of number 65

Object number 29

The booklet 2

  Photography projects at home

Fox has frequently turned her gaze upon the domestic, with projects like the Cockroach Diary, or 41 Hewitt Road, which document her life in Haringey. Even her earlier breakthrough projects felt domestic to her, as she was shooting in the town she grew up in or in the types of offices her family worked in. So it’s a surprise to learn that this sort of photography was frowned on during her time at college, despite the ground breaking work taking place in the US. “I’d always been a big fan of people like Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, people photographed their own hometowns or friendship group. But it was something we weren’t allowed to do when we were students. We were told not to photograph anything close to you because it was navel gazing.”

Despite a long list of photography projects, Anna Fox doesn’t feel under pressure to get them all finished quickly, nor does she worry about having so many on the go, preferring to switch from one to another as the inspiration finds her. “I think they feed off each other and I’m not in any kind of emergency to finish anything. That’s the privilege of being 60, I’ve finished enough not to have to worry. I like having different projects that are completely different to one another because when you get bogged down by one, you can just turn to the other. So there’s always some visual engagement that you can be involved in.”

The second edition of the book My Mothers’ Cupboards and My Fathers’ Words is available at https://www.herepress.org/books-prints/my-mothers-cupboards-my-fathers-words/ – just a few copies left. Here Press will publish Anna’s collaborative project with Alison Goldfrapp – Country Girls later in 2023.

Headstrong; Women and Empowerment, opens on 26th January at the new Centre for British Photography, curated by Anna with the Fast Forward Team.

Documentary Photography

More new documentary photography projects.