Exhibitions

Anna Fox – Cockroach Diary and Other Stories

Aug 28 - Oct 10 2009

Anna Fox is one of the most significant photographers to emerge from the new wave of British colour documentary of the 1980s. Cockroach Diary and Other Stories brings together works spanning twenty-five years that convey a compelling sense of both the ordinary and the bizarre in British life.

An infestation at her home in North London inspired the darkly comic Cockroach Diary, which combines queasy photographic evidence with frustrated diary entries: ‘3rd September 1996: splattered roach with orange shoe on bathroom wall – very drunk’. Country Girls, a collaboration with Alison Goldfrapp, was inspired by shared experiences of growing up as young women in ‘suffocating’ rural southern England in the 1970s, and depicts the singer collapsed under bushes or amongst bluebells.

Pictures of Linda is a 22-year long collaboration with punk singer Linda Lunus from local band Fashionable Living Death, and records her dressing-up sessions through photography and video. Fox says ‘ Linda became obsessed with having a document of herself, as she appeared in many different guises’. The Village, a deeply satirical narrative, depicts family weddings, fetes and women’s domestic lives in rural West Sussex. In a statement that could equally apply to her work in general, Fox explains, “I wanted to spend time investigating the realities (which I felt were hidden) lying behind the façade of the typical English picture postcard village”.

This Impressions Gallery Touring Exhibition also includes the works 41 Hewitt Road; My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words; Back to the Village; and Notes From Home.

Ffotogallery opening hours Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm Sundays/Monday Closed Admission FREE

About the Artist:

Anna Fox first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher's Britain, originally commissioned by Camerawork and The Museum of London. She is best known for Zwarte Piet (1993-8), a series of twenty portraits taken over a five-year period that explore Dutch 'black-face' folk traditions associated with Christmas. Other projects have included The Village (1992), a multi-media collaboration with the writer Val Williams, examining the experiences of rural women, and Friendly Fire, which records the leisure activity of paint-balling in the manner of war reportage. More recent publications include Cockroach Diary and My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words (2000), which deal with autobiographical narratives and were designed as miniature, limited edition books. She is Head of the BA in Photography at the University College of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Fox’s work is represented in a number of major collections.

Publication Anna Fox: Photographs 1983 – 2007, a 288pp full colour hardback monograph, edited by Val Williams, was recently published by Photoworks in association with Impressions Gallery.