LONDON.- James Hyman Photography presents a solo exhibition of Anna Fox’s newest series, RESORT, commissioned by Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, and supported by Butlin’s and University for the Creative Arts. Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Butlin’s group of holiday theme camps, Fox’s series explores this iconic British brand from a unique vantage point.
Produced over a two year period, the series captures the many facets of the modern holiday experience. Specifically focusing on the Bognor Regis resort, Fox has created a group of large format, hyper-real contemporary colour images which navigate the resort’s geography of leisure in all its lurid allure.
Super-saturated colours and ambient flash create dramatic compositions of families spending time in the brightly coloured spaces of this celebrated British institution. Fox often chooses to include elements of the mundane in her pictures to hint at the pleasurable absurdity of life in a theme park, where fences, air conditioning vents and bins feature as frequently as holidaying subjects. Visitors are lit up by an array of light – both natural and artificial, from video games, beauty-spa mirrors, mood-lit bars and fruit machines.
Anna Fox’s works continue an important lineage of photographs on the subject of Butlin’s folklore, most notably, John Hinde’s iconic postcard views of the 1960s as well as Martin Parr’s documentation of the social arenas of holiday parks. Fox’s contemporary interpretation juxtaposes the intimacy of personal relations with the surrealism of the setting to suggest playful—and sometimes critical—parodies of the experience of the British family camp.
The series consists of two parts, the first focusing on wholesome family holidays, the second on the new wave adult breaks.
Anna Fox has been an influential force in photography and video for over twenty years. Influenced by the British documentary tradition and US 'New Colourists' her first series Workstations, (Camerawork, London 1988) documented and satirised London office culture in the mid-Thatcher years. Her photographs of week-end paint-balling, Friendly Fire, were exhibited at The Victoria & Albert Museum, the Netherlands Foto Institute and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Fox has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London and The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago as well as a touring exhibition of her work Cockroach Diary and Other Stories and a major solo show in Krakow, Poland in 2010. She was also shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize the same year. Her work has been included in numerous international group shows - Through the Looking Glass, Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-garde (Tate Liverpool, 2007) and How We Are: Photographing Britain (Tate Britain, 2007) amongst others. Monographs or her work include Anna Fox Photographs 1983 -2007 (Photoworks, 2007). Fox is Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts at Farnham.
Fox is represented by James Hyman Photography, London.
